brassica VS files_reader

I’ve done something like this before to call Haskell from C++ (in [0]), so that I can build my GUI using Qt. It worked pretty well, except that I ran into various difficult-to-resolve linking problems on both Windows and Linux. After a year or two of trying to maintain it, I gave up and switched to a protocol where both sides pass JSON over stdin/stdout. This particular piece of software doesn’t require a huge amount of communication or shared data, so it works well enough.

The really nice thing about the original interop code, though, is that GHC’s new WASM backend uses essentially the same foreign function interface to export functions to JavaScript. So with only some minor modifications, I was able to get the same program working on a webpage [1], which I think is pretty cool.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

[1] At the risk of DDOS’ing my poor little home server: https://bradrn.com/brassica/

GHC’s WASM backend is already really useful! I also used it to port one of my own programs to the browser [0], albeit not using the DOM as this person did. Documentation is still sparse, but it’s a very similar process to creating a shared foreign library.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

No experience with Rust, but for a couple of personal projects I’ve written the logic in Haskell and the GUI in C++ (e.g. https://github.com/bradrn/brassica/blob/master/ARCHITECTURE....). It works pretty well, at least for smaller projects — the basic idea is that the Haskell code gets compiled into a library (static on Windows, dynamic on Linux) which the C++ side can link to. I’d imagine doing the same with Rust would be even easier, since it’s less of a pain to marshal stuff across the language barrier.

The biggest one for me is undoubtedly my custom keyboard layout Conkey [0], which I use constantly (including for typing this very comment). I hate the way the base US layout tends to get distorted in other keyboard layouts with good support for non-ASCII characters, so Conkey had the explicit goal of retaining that basic unshifted layout. I’ve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux — and given that I’m slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have ‘scratched my own itch’ too, which is nice.

Also, I made a utility to archive the full text of every website I view and store it in a SQLite database for searching. It’s proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I haven’t attempted to open-source it, though — it consists of three entirely separate components, two of which were a pain to set up. I must try to get it into a more usable state one of these days.)

What else… my sound change applier [1], perhaps? Not that I use it very much, because I only need it on those occasions when I want to do some conlanging, which I haven’t had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a ‘scratch own itch’ type of project in general… sometimes it feels like every conlanger has written their own, and no two can agree on a nice design. Everyone just has their own unique preferred way of doing things.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

Recently I’ve been trying to do some GTK+ programming again, as a change from my more recent attempts to use Qt with Haskell. Alas, when I try to build the example application from the documentation, I get an error:

Apps > Files > Reader (ebook reader). Works well enough in my limited testing.

Simple things like:

Spodcast, a Spofify->RSS bridge [1], made it because I listen to netcasts while working outside out of network reach (forest and field work).

Reader, a native-look epub/pdf/cb[rz] reader for Nextcloud [2], made it when my daughter was issued an iPad at school on which she was not allowed to install any "apps" while I thought the thing was tailor-made for reading books. The iPad was returned years ago but I recently updated Reader to make it run again.

...and a host of small tools which I make just when I need them, dumping them to GH for all to peruse, e.g.:

ZMapi, a Zoneminder CLI tool [3], made it when I installed a video surveillance system in the new barn which uses Chinese cameras which I do not want to be able to access the 'net directly.

bs, a Bookstack API CLI tool [4], made it when I needed to upload a large number of conference videos to a Bookstack site.

...etc

I don't have much time for these side things since I'm mostly busy on and around the farm but every now and then the weather is a good excuse to keep me inside...

[1] https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast

[2] https://github.com/Yetangitu/files_reader

[3] https://github.com/Yetangitu/zmapi

[4] https://github.com/Yetangitu/bs

I gave Reader a good kick, shook out the debris from the tree and made it look a bit more like a "modern" (ha!) Nextcloud app and with that it should work again on current Nextcloud. Find it here:

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/files_reader

...or here:

https://github.com/Yetangitu/files_reader

...or install it directly in NC. For those who give it a try let me know - through Github - if it work as intended.