Viewing profile — chris_armstrong

I didn't interpret it as an argument about layers of abstraction. You need to be in the detail at the level you're writing (and it's certainly advantageous to know some of the deta…

It might just be me, but I find his baroque style very readable. Despite using a vocabulary much broader than mine (irritating but admirable), he at least seems to have read his pr…

I'm working on ocgtk, which are GTK4+ bindings for OCaml. My current focus is adding support for signals, amongst other things: https://www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/ocgtk-developme…

Not yet - it's mostly a build tool, but package management abilities (which is otherwised covered by opam) is being added to it^1. It's currently usable for some projects (and wort…

Installing via opam and using the cygwin method is supported and should be working fine (cygwin is just used for build - binaries still just link with mingw). That specific combina…

I completely forgot about Wolverine, but you've reminded me I was using that back in the day to read my mail from Fidonet point (as well as Bluewave).

“cognitive surrender” It’s maddening, because you can’t reason with a person who won’t even think for themselves

The answer, as always, is to write a compelling story about it, and make the front page of ‘new’.

No where in Australia would you expect a fridge to be supplied as part of a tenancy. It does restrict what you can buy, as may removalists will not touch move a fridge if there’s t…

I would say Australian English relies on this negation even more than British English, to the point of being confusing without more cultural context.

Genuine independence is almost impossible at this size, because you need a strong internal discipline to only rely on small donors, and not bend your organisation’s mission to keep…

I think this because nonprofits are subject to a similar market discipline as companies: they compete for funding, relevance, market share etc. And their board composition converge…

Non profit organisations trying to remain relevant (or just survive) behave this way because they arent much different from companies operating in a market for profit. Their leader…

I stand corrected - there’s so little known about it that it’s probably some strange labor of love from recent centuries

It was discovered in the 1800s, the shell grotto is much much older and probably built over a very long period of time

This is probably the highlight of a visit to an otherwise unremarkable English seaside town. The chambers are very old (even by English standards) and so unlike anything else medie…

It's interesting reading many of the associated comments, because there is a genuinely active effort to address many of the pain points of the language: * Windows support has impro…

I also find languages like OCaml avoid a lot of this nonsense in their libraries because the ability to build layers and layers of complex abstraction isn’t there in the same way a…

This resonates. I spent a fair bit of time thinking about library design for an OCaml library that didn’t directly expose more complicated language features (like functors and firs…

The ICFP/SPLASH papers are now starting to find their way to HN. This was a HUGE combined programming conference with several competing tracks over 7 days. You can find the program…

zig has a cross-compiler frontend (zig cc) which can be used as a drop-in replacement for a custom sysroot + binutils + gcc for several platforms. I've used it to build OCaml cross…

If I recall correctly, this is one of the final pieces that allows zig to be used as a fully self-contained cross-compiling C toolchain (once its linker is enabled for more platfor…

Damn this is a blast from the past - it was such an ambitious project with so many interesting ideas to explore. CoreObject itself was revolutionary in its thinking about distribut…

I almost never find a use for GADTs or functors or carefully specifying module types, but when I need them, they help me get stuff done neatly. Even the object system which most OC…

As someone who uses OCaml for hobby projects, I appreciate how little the language gets in your way when you want to just “get shit done”, despite the language’s origins in academi…