Jake Arkinstall

YouTube video by Chicago C++ User Group In Search of the Perfect Return: A C++ Programming Journey

One of my favourite talks to have seen in person just got published: youtube.com/watch?v=sIZU... go check out Walter's brilliant presentation!

The attack surface expands considerably when relaying data through a plant pot. And that bird is definitely up to something.

arxiv.org/html/2510.07...

The deeper I go with plugin architectures, the more I realise that the Dunning-Kruger graph for linking is actually a sin wave.

I’m very sad to report the passing of Rainer Grimm. I can’t possibly say how great a contribution he made to the C++ community; fortunately, his blog can.

www.modernescpp.com/index.php/my...

My kingdom for more monitors

TIL.

Wasteful.

What in tarnation

devenv/src/modules/integrations/android.nix at main · cachix/devenv Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments using Nix - cachix/devenv

You still get that with devenv - in the docs link I sent you can see how to fully configure the environment. It's still also running nix under the hood. It just makes sane choices about what's local and mutable and what's static. Here's how they do it github.com/cachix/deven...

That's priceless for development.

I used to do everything with nix derivations and stuff like "add this useful library" could take hours, when an Ubuntu user could just pip or apt install and have it in seconds.

Nix itself is best for packaging once you have already made your project, IMO.

E.g. you can say "python environment with the uv package manager plz". Then you can just "uv add" to add a dependency.

The benefit - no need to specify the universe in Nix. You can install stuff like like anyone else.

The cost is that reproducibility becomes trust-based - e.g. that UV is sensible.

I have no android experience but that sounds like one of the big problems devenv solves.

That which is immutable goes to the nix store and gets referenced from the venv. That which is mutable is managed locally.

You're tied to hermeticity when it makes sense, whereas raw flakes prefer all the time

Well, kind of a blog. I want to do a bunch of interactive stuff as well that would be really awkward with existing backends.

The reason I'm revising it?

To build a custom web backend, using CrowCPP, md4c, sqlite, scss, etc.

Even have an ingress router and auto rebuilds on file changes.

Why? For a blog.

Silly? Yes. Pragmatic? Absolutely not. But there is a lot of joy in building silly stuff for the sheer sake of it is.

YouTube video by Jake Arkinstall Building C++ projects in Nix using Nozzle

I did a video on it once.

youtu.be/BaR_GB7Tji4

Basically I disliked cmake, disliked Bazel, and loved Nix. Because each file is a derivation, only modified intermediates are changed on rebuild. Makes it very heavy on the nix store writes when you're in full swing dev mode though.

Spent the evening resurrecting my old C++ build system Nozzle (written in Nix, but you define libraries and builds from source files like in Bazel).

It works very nicely. Would be interesting to see if I could add support for rust too.

Android - devenv Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments using Nix

For dev stuff, devenv is often the way to go IMO.

It's still nix, but it works in a really nice way and has a bunch of stuff configured out of the box in a way that's super easy to share with other devs (on any Linux or MacOS setup)

devenv.sh/integrations...

We've now even gone past postmodern C++ and are now entering late-stage C++.

As for understanding how long Windows runners take, the physics hasn't been invented yet.

One hypothesis is that they involve the use of Reissner-Nordstrom black holes, and that they complete in a reasonable timeframe - but in an inaccessible universe.

GitHub is moving at 0.964c relative to you.

This is why a CI run that GitHub Actions says took 8 minutes actually felt like 30 minutes.

"Of course you can't actually pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that's impossible"

You spent 4 days either inventing hoverboots or writing an assembler that operated through hoverboot-related means.

And in the 5th day you rested.

Hey #qec people! Do you like writing software? Do you want a #job? Come join us at #quantinuum! #quantum #quantumcomputing #jobad
jobs.eu.lever.co/quantinuum/d...

999 is a good choice for the final episode. Any more than that, and rumour has it that the right side of the screen corrupts, there isn't enough fruit to finish the episode, and Jason would spend eternity trying to escape ghosts.

Have you tried the spack slack?

Nix is great for "I want to configure this once, built it a few times, and it should work many places".

But that's not really the HPC use case.

E.g. Spack's original paper discussed Nix (amongst others) and provided the benefits of something different.

tgamblin.github.io/pubs/spack-s...

ADHDGI

User: "hey chat, get me started with making a basic blog"

ChatGPT: "Wordpress? Ghost? Hugo? OOHH I HAVE AN IDEA. Make every post a commit message. Your menu could be a mermaid diagram. Ooh maybe we could use an FPGA, and rebuild on push to main. Btw do you have an rj45 crimp tool?"

The cast of Bridgerton alongside their friendly neighbourhood spidergentleman

Next season of Bridgerton is going to be lit.

YouTube video by GOTO Conferences The Future of Microprocessors • Sophie Wilson • GOTO 2024

Very cool talk (about very hot silicon).

youtu.be/MkbgZMCTUyU

Where, and how many times are you going to invoke the function?

If a few times and you're willing to have some execution overhead, libffi is solid and has support for many platforms.

If it's executed many many times, or in a sensitive point on the hot path, I'd begin to consider JIT.

Closed loop? No. The unknot? No. The it's knot? Yes!

Hear me out though

Count me in. Thanks!