Programming projects in 2021

It has again become time to summarize the top FOSS projects I've been involved with during the past year. Not all projects I worked on are listed; I've tried to limit it to the ones where I spent the largest amount of time, or where I consider the project/work done to be particularly interesting for one reason or another.

(The text below is an excerpt from my general page about programming which can be found here.)

• 2021

  • Perlang (97h): Continued towards the first 0.1.0 release. It's nice to not in any way be bound by any "external" timetable of any form for this project. Perlang is simply a sparetime interest of mine where I am free to decide when and how to release (or not release) the software. I really enjoy this, to be honest. Even though I have spent a fair amount of time on the project already, and it definitely is usable (at least for REPL/simple scenarios like calculating 2 ** 32 and so forth), there are still open bugs (3 at the time of writing) that I am aware of. I am currently planning to both fix these, and perhaps add some new functionality as well, before I call it a 0.1.0. release.

    Here are some of the achievements during the year (full list of commits here):

    • Various docs/website-related improvements: 6a0802a, #154, #156, c9c7393, #166, #173, #175, #176, #179, #192, #194...
    • Upgrade to .NET 5.0 (#126) and .NET 6 (#223)
    • Implement addition and subtraction assignment (#148) and modulo operator (#152)
    • Add long (#210), double (#236) and bigint (#238) types, fix integer expansions to bigint (#234).
    • Support hexadecimal (#217), binary (#219) and octal literals (#220).
    • Move away from using the dynamic keyword (#225, #237)
    • A bunch of bug fixes and other improvements (#188, #199, #235...)

  • perlun.eu.org (16h): I wrote a few blog posts, where this one is one that I'd particularly like to highlight: Saying goodbye to an old friend: Decommissioning a Raspberry Pi web server. Writing this blog post was only part of the job; doing the actual work to planning the move, figuring out where to host things and so forth was also a bit of an effort. See the actual post for more details.

    I also moved the CI which is used to publish the website to https://perlun.eu.org away from Travis, over to GitHub Actions: #28. There is little reason to not use the built-in GitHub Actions these days, at least for my kind of use cases. One of the best things about GitHub Action is that the delay before a job starts is really low (more or less "instant" once you push your code). This is nice; I don't like waiting on computers.

  • halleluja.nu (10h): Some new content was written and published:

    • Tycker Gud om mig?, a short sermon in Swedish.
    • A new Bible Study section was added (in English). My aim is to write a sort of "commentary" on the Bible, chapter-by-chapter. Now, there are 929+260 chapters in the Christian bible, so going through them all will probably take a "few more years" at this pace... Nonetheless, you need to start somewhere.

  • sitegen (6h): Not much to mention here, except that I gave F# a brief try. F# is a functional programming language in the ML family which seems a bit interesting. A friend of mine (Tobias Lindqvist) is very interested in it and has been speaking positively about it to me. I tried it out and it was indeed quite nice, with a fairly elegant syntax. It was also nice to be able to create methods with "non-standard names" like creates a non-null TopLevelConfig.Config: this is impossible in languages like C# but quite simple in F#.

    I ended up rewriting the class in question in C# instead, because of the fact that F# lacked inner classes which I wanted to use for grouping my test methods. Nonetheless, it was interesting to try out a new programming language; it's not something you do every day.

  • darkerfx (5h): No web site is complete without a proper "dark theme"; perlang.org is no exception to this rule. The Perlang web site is built using DocFX, and there was already a dark theme for DocFX named darkfx. I made some changes to the theme and also converted the CSS to SASS. All in all, this was a fun endeavour and I do actually enjoy doing some frontend work from time to time. As long as I can stay away from the horrors of Javascript...

  • ansible-config (5h): While doing the work described in the blog post previously mentioned, I also extracted some Ansible roles from my existing "roles+config" repo, along with some new roles, and published them in a GitHub repo. It's not very fancy at all, but especially for those of you not yet familiar with Ansible it could perhaps be a bit useful as inspiration for your own roles.

  • dotfiles (4h): As usual, a bit of work here and there on this repo was made during the year. I want to highlight one particular commit: f03d340, in which I added dark_mode and light_mode shell aliases (well, in fact, shell functions). This was useful for me when doing "out-on-the-balcony" hacking in the summer time, where the sunlight simply made the usage of a dark theme impractical. Off to the terminal and type light_mode, and there you go - switching both the Firefox, Cinnamon and GTK themes all in one go.

    Unfortunately, I had some struggles with VS Code getting it to properly detect the theme being changed. It turns out that this is caused by an Electron/Chromium limitation. I guess this is one of the disadvantages of running GNU/Linux as your desktop OS; it's clearly less common than Windows and macOS.

  • protobuf (2h): This was an interesting experience. I created a pull request, based on an initial effort from another contributor that hadn't been merged. I don't regularly work with C++, so it was nice to be able to do something in that language for a change (I historically used C++ quite extensively, for example when writing the tanstaafl Fidonet client in the late '90s, but I haven't used it professionally for many, many years).

    One thing that struck me was the compilation times: it took ages just to be able to build the project (which isn't that huge, I think). Compared to other languages I regularly use (Java and C#), the difference is significant. This is in one way expected since both of these languages compile to intermediate form instead of building "full" native binaries (like C and C+++ does), but still: it was an interesting thing to realize.

  • sudo-1.8.3p1-patched (1h): Finally, a few words about this one. Sometimes, life brings you to do rather odd things - this was clearly one of the more unexpected things this year. Because of CVE-2021-3156 and an old Ubuntu 12.04 machine that needed to be patched, I spent some time essentially "backporting" the Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) fix to the sudo package in Ubuntu 12.04. In one way, this was a fun exercise since I don't tend to do that much C programming these days. In another way, it's obviously a bit sad to have to spend time patching a server running a 9-year old Linux distro which is well past the EOL time. But, what do you do...

There we go, you've reached the end. Thanks for going through the year together with me.

Wish you all the best for the new year!