Notices by Ekaitz Zarraga 👹 (ekaitz_zarraga@mastodon.social)

@cwebber I was the one who added the Voxel Remesher to Blender in Guix in 2021 because I wanted to use that workflow hehehehe

@cwebber Dyntopo or Remesh? Which one are you using here?

@cwebber @xan Good job!
I was a sculptor in a previous life and spent some time with 3D... I should go back to it! Thanks for the reminder!

Now that #guile is in codeberg, there's no excuse for y'all!
Time to learn programming language internals and contribute to one of the best scheme implementations out there.

https://codeberg.org/guile/guile

@janneke sending an email to Tim also works well every single time :)

So I just made this minimal macro expander avoid destroying things and create new lists instead.

It feels good. I also cleaned up the API a little bit and added it as a built in.

Now the problem is I don't know how to make the module system work, and I'm tired.

Maybe I should start with the CPS and scheme compilation??
Hmmmm

Okay I promised I was going to stream a little bit today so let's go.

I'm rewriting the GNU Mes macro expander API in order to make it non-destructive and a little bit more reasonable.

https://twitch.tv/ekaitzza

Come and say hi and all that because I want to also share some thoughts and want to know what you have to say about them.

Light coding today.

@hipsterelectron there are many other projects involved on it, but yeat. GNU Mes ftw.

This dude @janneke was stubborn enough to write this thing and continue to add things to it during years of development, rewrote big chunks of it to make it more bootstrappable with M2-Planet and so on.
Quite a hard job that doesn't really look that hard at the beginning.

It doesn't really take the credit it deserves.

Hacking live in GNU Mes again, but mostly talking and having some fun for a couple of hours:

https://twitch.tv/ekaitzza

C / Scheme

@civodul
I believe nobody would agree on suggesting a vegan restaurant to serve meat is good, neither respectful. We are accepting it here, just "because the users". What about those that come here because this is the only vegan place they have available?

2/2

@civodul I don't think them being a majority actually changes anything if this is an ethical decision.

We can change our restaurant from being vegan to vegetarian if you consider that more appropriate but... "People drink milk at home anyway!"

Idk, man.

I believe the only reason this is being discussed is because there's a collective that hates GNU and wants to separate us from them in any way.

1/2

@civodul Yes.
You are right, but could be understood as a contrary effect: it doesn't help to raise awareness about how difficult it is to make use of your computing without proprietary blobs.

Somehow, its helping proprietary vendors subtly be accepted. Is that promoting freedom?

I agree on the practicality side, but also, in Guix I see pretty often things like "we shouldn't engage with this or that to say we do not condone what they do" but are ok with condoning non-free software?

@civodul @dthompson @daviwil I mean, I don't like making the users we already have less comfortable in order to comfort some potential users that didn't even bother to read the actual front page of the project that it says we are a 100% free software distribution.

@civodul @dthompson @daviwil Shouldn't we just tell the users that there are some drivers needed that we don't directly provide be enough?

Is it possible to know that from inside guix easily?
If we listed: your current device won't have this and that available because that requires proprietary software, if you really need that please take a look to other providers like nonguix. I believe it should be enough.

Our ethics are important, many of our users like Guix because of them.

Back to hacking in GNU Mes.

Today module system vs macro expansion. Who will win the fight???

https://twitch.tv/ekaitzza

@janneke But anyway, as I said, the GC is pretty good, probably one of the best parts of Mes, so keeping it is a great idea imho.

Also we could just disable it very easily and check, there are some environment variables for that, right?
cc @civodul

@janneke It depends, during the runtime it may, during compilation... I'd need to do a good job for that hehe.

@janneke About the memory, you mmap a huge piece of memory (terabytes) and wait until the operating system says no.

But I believe having a simple and effective garbage collector like the one we have is more than useful for:

a) People who want to learn how does a simple scheme implementation work
b) Maybe some long-running program written in scheme... Maybe a simple init system for minimal machines? IDK

@janneke Sure, I read it several times. I own a physical copy of the book. :)

I did many drawings for myself, but now I understand it it's enough with some text. The blogposts are more of a self-reminder than anything else. In any case, I think I did a good job explaining the process in text. We should bet more in text sometimes, engineers should be good at communicating, and training that skill is useful.

:)

I just published some blog post about the GNU #Mes garbage collector and how I'm trying to make it more appealing for myself.

Also, funny stuff, I didn't do any drawing, which would've explained everything way more easily. I just did that in prose, like a real G.

https://ekaitz.elenq.tech/fasterMes2.html