infer VS sydent

I think most development occurs on problems that can't be formally modeled anyway. Most developers work on things like, "can you add this feature to the e-commerce site? And can the pop-up be blue?" which isn't really model-able.

But that's not to say that formal methods are useless! We can still prove some interesting aspects of programs -- for example, that every lock that gets acquired later gets released. I think tools like Infer[0] could become common in the coming years.

[0]: https://fbinfer.com/

Using infer, someone else exploited null-dereference checks to introduce simple affine types in C++. Cppcheck also checks for null-dereferences. Unfortunately, that approach means that borrow-counting references have a larger sizeof than non-borrow counting references, so optimizing the count away potentially changes the semantics of a program which introduces a whole new way of writing subtly wrong code.

Meta/Facebook are long time OCaml users, their logo is on the OCaml website. Their static analysis tool and its predecessor are both written in OCaml.

Efforts: Dependabot, CodeQL, Coverity, facebook's Infer tool, etc

I notice there isn't fbinfer. It's pretty cool, and is used for this library.

TBH, there's a non-zero amount of non-"ivory tower" tools you may have used that are written in functional languages. Say, Pandoc or Shellcheck are written in Haskell; Infer and Flow are written in OCaml. RabbitMQ and Whatsapp are implemented in Erlang (FB Messenger was too, originally; they switched to the C++ servers later). Twitter backend is (or was, at least) written in Scala.

- borrow-cpp which exploits some null dereference checks in the infer static analyzer to model some of borrow checking.

GitHub Discussions can also be a great place for support as long as these are regularly monitored. Another option along the same lines is Discourse and the Open Source Matrix which is used by quite a few Open Source and community-based projects.

I'd love something like the Matrix [0] data model (JSON messages aggregated in an eventually-consistent chatroom CRDT) transmitted over something like simplex for metadata resistance.

[0] https://matrix.org

Matrix - I currently have my family chat on WhatsApp, but I plan to give my daughters tablets for Xmas and I want them to have a way to chat with family without needing to have a phone number or signup to WhatsApp.

Telegram isn't great for having a main topic with siloed discussions about sub-categories of things.

Slack costs a lot of money if you want searchable history.

Matrix (https://matrix.org/) is pretty bad when you get to using it. It works, but the QOL isn't up to Discord's level.

Discord is just as easy to replace as any other chat platform if they decide to sell out or destroy their product.