Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

#41

Post by mathieudombrock » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 7:01 AM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #17

FormerLabFred wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our modern languages are built on it, and it’s incredibly fast, so it deserves to be kept alive. We owe a great deal to the people who wrote it in the 1950s I guess

> Our modern languages are built on it It's part of the lineage, yeah, probably started with Algol though? Fast I guess is always nice, but I'm not sure that's enough to keep it alive solely for that, at least to me.

I think the best answer you're really going to get here is that it's cool and fun to learn and use old languages.

Re: Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

#42

Post by arunakt » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 7:03 AM UTC

thats COBOL :)

Re: Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

#43

Post by lzhgusapp » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

Love seeing niche Show HN projects like this. The choice of Fortran is wild but that's what makes it fun. As someone building small Mac utilities, I appreciate any project that proves you don't need a massive stack to ship something useful.

Re: Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

#44

Post by Melatonic » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 8:01 AM UTC

FormerLabFred wrote: post #6

cat-turner wrote: post #2

out of curiosity, why fortran? no disrespect. I wrote a lot of scientific software in the earlier days of my career and I learned fortran to update ocean modeling software.

You are not the first one to ask :) We built Cobolsky. Will go public soon. Parallelly too curious on Fortran. The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it :) When we are building the feed composer, in next version, Fortran will be great for the algorithm etc. Keeping the ancient languages alive. I built some Cobol stuff many years ago. Back at it again. Rusty. Both Cobolsky and Fortransky loo…

How do COBOL and Fortran compare for something like this ?

Re: Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

#45

Post by FormerLabFred » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 8:03 AM UTC

lzhgusapp wrote: post #43

Love seeing niche Show HN projects like this. The choice of Fortran is wild but that's what makes it fun. As someone building small Mac utilities, I appreciate any project that proves you don't need a massive stack to ship something useful.

Thanks for the feedback!

We got a spec for Assemblersky. Will be a weekend project. Cancel Easter :) And probably Midsummer too…

We got image composer and decoder plugged in in dev env, but will let this first open version breathe first. ASCII or early Apple algo

Fortran-fast feed builder probably in next open version. It crunches fast

Morning, 9 o’clock in Sweden, coffee and check-the-feed-on- Fortransky-time :)

Re: Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

#46

Post by FormerLabFred » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 8:10 AM UTC

zoom6628 wrote: post #37

Brilliant in every possible way. Fortran was first language I learnt at high school in its "PORTRAN" variant.

:) We tried Abacus Fortran on the C64 back in the days and were allowed to stay indoors during breaks doing Basic stuff too on school computer.

One of the guys wrote 8xxROM some 10 years later.

Today known as U−Boot :)

Re: Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

#47

Post by FormerLabFred » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 8:55 AM UTC

Melatonic wrote: post #44

FormerLabFred wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not the first one to ask :) We built Cobolsky. Will go public soon. Parallelly too curious on Fortran. The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it :) When we are building the feed composer, in next version, Fortran will be great for the algorithm etc. Keeping the ancient languages alive. I built some Cobol stuff many years ago. Back at it again. Rusty. Both Cobolsky and Fortransky loo…

How do COBOL and Fortran compare for something like this ?

COBOL is more painful, Fortran better.

Good you raised the topic, can write a blog post on it when we ship Cobolsky. Will be a proof of concept repo. Fortransky is the one

(If AT Proto did fixed-width records instead of JSON, COBOL would be formidable)

Re: Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

#48

Post by FormerLabFred » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 8:59 AM UTC

hedora wrote: post #32

FormerLabFred wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our modern languages are built on it, and it’s incredibly fast, so it deserves to be kept alive. We owe a great deal to the people who wrote it in the 1950s I guess

I came here to suggest COBOL as a better fit, then saw your comment a few levels up in this thread. Out of curiosity, does your implementation use CODASYL? (For people that don't pay much attention to historical software systems, most CODASYL implementations were similar to JSON document databases, so going that way isn't as crazy as it sounds.)

Great comment! Thanks!

No CODASYL, the JSON parser is hand-rolled Fortran with a depth-tracking key scanner

CODASYL not a crazy direction for the feed composer

Got more depth to explore here, still early :)

Re: Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

#49

Post by FormerLabFred » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 9:04 AM UTC

deadbabe wrote: post #36

enriquto wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why fortran? why not? the language is straightforward and loops are fast. It is portable and your code will work unchanged for the next 50 years. It may be a bit verbose, but that's not a big deal with today's tooling.

Great, can we see some benchmarks?

Cobolsky holds the record for most surprised looks per line of code :)

Fortransky benchmarks pending

the feed scorer will have real numbers worth reporting

Whenever time allows in future: Fortran vs Go vs Python

Re: Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

#50

Post by FormerLabFred » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 9:07 AM UTC

youhai wrote: post #40

From my experience building browser automation tools, the biggest challenge with most Chromium-based solutions is that their TLS fingerprint is a dead giveaway. Firefox-based approaches tend to fare much better against JA3/JA4 fingerprinting. The key insight is moving fingerprint spoofing from the JS level (which is itself detectable) down to the native C++ level. It's a fundamentally different approach.

Multiple tabs open? :)