gloggery, Kakoune, and wasm

The tilde.team server rebuild on Ubuntu 20.03 seems to be all done. It was pretty smooth for us users, all told. Nice work.

gloggery now has command line arguments with pretty ok defaults, instead of baking my own setup into code. It also builds only posts that are new or changed, unless you include an argument to rebuild. About all that's left to do is a readme, I think.

gloggery

I tried the Kakoune text editor for an evening, and I liked its new ideas. But I found it was a little too far from standard behavior for me. The last straw was not having ctrl-W available to delete a word in insert mode. Back to plain vim.

Kakoune

Weechat's smart join/part message filtering made IRC much nicer for me.

WeeChat smart filters

Speaking of chat, on #gemini I was clued in to the idea that WebAssembly will be useful as a general purpose server-side environment, like a CLR or JVM, but with perhaps more compatibility with source languages than, say, the way the JVM's bytecode affected the design of Kotlin. It looks promising in the long run, and I'm enjoying Cadey's experiments in building Gemini pages with wasm as CGI.

CGI support in Maj

wasm example

But it's also early in wasm's life. A dream I have is to build backend bits with a language that is good for safety, performance, and programmer time spent. The sheer number of languages that build to wasm is exciting, because one of those might be the right thing someday.

In my mind the closest thing is Swift, which is great at this on the front end, but it has a long way to go before it's mature for server applications. Compile times need work, too.

Even if these aren't tools I end up using for good, I've been having a great time experimenting and learning in the tildeverse. It wouldn't happen like this if we weren't gathered in one spot where we can be exposed to new ideas.

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