Notices by Andy Wingo (wingo@mastodon.social), page 2

lovely summary of the knuth-plass line breaking algorithm ~~ https://github.com/jaroslov/knuth-plass-thoughts/blob/master/plass.md

i have many other things to do so of course i am reading about line breaking instead

with regards to programming languages: {industrial impact, being on the cutting edge of research, having fun} seems to be one of those classic "pick two, at best" situations

@rml @shegeley @cwebber @monkey1 the issue is entirely about language: is a define form essentially a creation of a mutable storage location along with an initial value? if so, AOT inlining of top-level definitions is impossible; the compiler cannot reason about the values of top-level / module-level definitions. guile moved away from this model with declarative modules.

@rml @shegeley @cwebber @monkey1 if your mental model is still “a top-level var reference necessarily loads the current value from its storage location” you need to be compiling without optimizations, otherwise you will have unpleasant surprises

@cwebber @shegeley @rml if it helps to clarify it was mentally pronounced in a french accent !

@shegeley @rml @cwebber but generally for this to be possible you need to have inhibited some optimizations by opting into a different dialect. see https://www.gnu.org/software/guile//manual/html_node/Declarative-Modules.html

@shegeley @rml @cwebber most schemers are republicans, in the anti-monarchist sense :) but if the intended use case is global monkeypatching, then in guile `set!` is your tool. if `a` is exported, then just `set!` on `a`. if not, `(set! (@@ (X) a) new-val)`

@robinheghan only superficial, the kind you get after anything that requires stitches. nothing deep. a bit of an annoying place to have stitches, of course ;)

operation was yesterday, am feeling pretty good today, walked kids to school :) back to work, even!

anyway this thread is for cishet men because i am sure trans/etc people are already aware of all the biology here. it is not right that women should have to be responsible for contraception and more men should consider the scissors! ✂️✂️✂️✂️

this is not a lewd account but i should mention that apparently sex life is unaffected: the ejaculate liquid is still there, just without sperm.

and then! it is not immediately effective; you have to take a sperm count 3 months after to verify that, you know, life doesn’t manage to find a way.

so my surgery is in a week. apparently is just outpatient surgery under sedation (not general anaesthesia). some countries normalize the idea that it is reversible but france’s official line is that it is definitive, apparently; reversal operations are like only 50% successful apparently?

then there is a legally-mandated 4 month waiting period! like doctor i have three kids. make it stop

here in france it takes a couple months at least to get the first appt with the urologist. (i did not know that urologists were the ones to do this. my grandfather was a urologist and i thought he just did urinary tract infections? apparently they do many things? i am a grown adult and yet v ignorant)

am getting my partner a v nice present for our wedding anniversary: 🎉 a vasectomy 🎉

4. there is no 4, 3 should be enough for anybody!

3. more ephemerally, i have a little bare-bones baseline-style compile-to-c scheme in the works. uses the c control stack but a side value stack, so as to have packed GC roots. the compiler is in scheme of course. the intent is to be a useful-enough approximation of a production system to use when testing https://github.com/wingo/whippet-gc/. who knows if it is fit for purpose though; will publish when it works 🤪

2. the work in that bobkonf talk for @spritelyinst is continuing apace; i think we are maybe 90% done for core Guile, e.g. call-with-prompt is working though abort-to-prompt isn't yet. still quite some prelude / stdlib work to do, and compiling multiple modules in a single compilation unit; maybe 2 calendar months out. Follow along at https://gitlab.com/spritely/guile-hoot if that is your thing.

a few schemey things ~~
1. video from my talk in march at @bobkonf is up -- webassembly as a target for Scheme and other weird languages https://bobkonf.de/2023/wingo.html. if you prefer text, check out https://wingolog.org/archives/2023/03/20/a-world-to-win-webassembly-for-the-rest-of-us instead.