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Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

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Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

#473
post #89

I'm working on "Cargo but for C". It started out as something marginally more useful than vendoring your dependencies as submodules + baking in the knowledge of how to build a bunch of common projects. I realized, though, that there was somehow a huge gap in the insane world of C build tools. There's nothing that: - Lets you pin really precisely and builds everything from source (i.e. no binary repository) - Does not…

Nice stuff! I'm keen to see this too.

I love programming in rust. Lots of non-rust developers think the whole point of rust is safety, but honestly, the things I like most about using it are the quality of life features like cargo. I love the idea of bringing that to C!

Relevant to this thread: I've spent the last week or so hand porting SeL4 from C to Rust, mostly so I can learn how it works (and learn OS development more generally). One of the biggest pain points I've had trying to use SeL4 is understanding the insanely complex way it uses cmake to compile the kernel and userland software. With Cargo, I can just run `cargo build` on my rust kernel project and it just works[1]. I don't even have a build.rs.

Anyway, I'd love it if we had a tool that made sel4 so easy to build. I doubt it'll be that simple, but its a lovely goal.

[1] (Well, except for one small step: You need to run objcopy to convert the 64 bit elf into a 32 bit elf to run it in qemu. But other than that!)

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

#474
post #174

https://mytinycafe.com/ An PWA primarily for my wife and my daughter. They can order their hot chocolate and their coffee as if they were going to grab something at a fancy café downtown, but instead it's at home and I'm the barista. It is quite nice to have for when my wife comes back from work and want something specific, or when we are waiting for the visit of a few friend, they can order exactly the available bev…

FYI this is a blank page on Firefox :(

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

#475
Working on my language learning app (Python, tkinter) "Xiaolong Dictionary"[0]

It is supposed to implement all kinds of features, that I usually miss in vocabulary learning applications, such as a very powerful search function, and the ability to add arbitrary tags, a table of words, and learning progress statistics (not yet implemented).

It has minimalistic dependencies. Currently the only non-development dependency it has is jsonschema.

I keep the configuration of the application in a JSON file. This configuration already allows to configure many things, like for example the various learn levels, and what their meaning in terms of the spaced repetition system is, which attributes of a word will be revealed in what order, when practicing, what attributes to show in the columns of the vocabulary table, and what font to use for the big character display widget (useful for languages like Chinese).

It's AGPL, so feel free to fork, but adhere to the license.

[0]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/tkapp

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

#476
I've spent the last week starting to hand port SeL4 to rust. Mostly because I want to learn how kernels & capabilities work. This seems like a fun way to get my hands dirty with operating systems without needing to invent everything from scratch.

To be clear, there's no benefit to using rust over C for SeL4. SeL4 is formally verified - which provides a level of assurance far beyond what the rust compiler can check at compile time. I'm really just doing it for fun and learning. I've been wanting to really understand sel4 for awhile, and there's something wonderful about learning it from the ground level.

So far, I've got a stub booting. The CPU successfully boots into 64 bit mode and starts running my rust code. I'm starting with x86_64 because thats whats on my desk. At the moment I'm porting the code which locates the root process via multiboot, so I can set everything up in memory correctly.

If anyone is curious, here's the repo: https://github.com/josephg/sel4-rs

Its pretty bare bones for now, but everything starts simple!

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

#477
Cross-platform game framework for/in the Odin programming language. It's also the foundation for my first Steam release. The plan is to get something out on Steam, roll with the punches (bugs,) then open it up for general-use. I say "framework" instead of "engine" because the scope of the project is to make the decisions the beginners get stuck on and free them to make a game. That's a smaller goal than what you see with Unity, Godot and Unreal, but I am already at the point that I'd rather use my thing than Godot.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

#480
https://finbodhi.com — It helps you track, understand, and plan your personal finances — with a double-entry accounting. You own your financial data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit. Supports multiple-accounts (track as a family or even as an advisor), multi-currency, a custom sheet/calculator to operate on your accounts (calculate taxes etc) and much more.

Soon, we will have benchmarking capability. You would be able to compare your networth growth with inflation, compare your investment returns with benchmark etc. We would support both nav and value based benchmark. The topic is interesting in itself, and somehow, not emphasized/available in most tools.

Asset price fetching and benchmarking works best for Indian markets. We would like to build better support for international assets and benchmarks, but haven't figured how to get the data.

NOTE: you can try demo without signup, but it doesn't work in Firefox Incognito mode.

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