libarchive VS libuv

29. October 2021 At this point Jia Tan pops up, and the first thing we see from him is an innocuous patch to the xz repository, and while a lot of people believe he started out trying his luck with another library also known as libarchive, this is not the case, I would bet it’s more of a backup looking at the dates, being that there are a few days in between as shown in this commit.

Potentially malicious commit by same author on libarchive: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/pull/1609

Full agreement, and with the addition of xpk¹/xfd² as natural extensions to that extensibility too. I see things like xfd supporting xz¹, and I'm simultaneously amazed that it exists and happy that I don't need to do xz {,de}compression on 68k ;)

I guess we have something similar-ish with libarchive⁴, but nobody(including me) has pushed the extra mile to get file dialogs to support random compression and decompression formats.

Beyond OT: I didn't realise how much stuff was still going on at aminet, but I love love LOVE that people are still dropping new car sets for Geoff Crammond's F1GP.

¹ http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xpk_User

² http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xfdmaster

³ http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/xfd_lzma.lha

⁴ https://www.libarchive.org/

I don't have a preview channel install handy to check, but apparently they're using libarchive so here's the full list assuming they expose everything it supports:

https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/LibarchiveForm...

As announced at the Build conference back in May, this build adds native support for reading additional archive file formats using the libarchive open-source project such as

LibarchiveFormats · libarchive/libarchive Wiki · GitHub

Seems what they're using is BSD-liscensed: https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki

I wound up on a different team with pre-existing Python code so temporarily shelved my use of Go for a bit, and we used Sanic (an async Python framework built on top of the excellent uvloop & libuv that also powers Node.js) to build some APIs for live channel management & operations. We hand-wrote our OpenAPI and used it to generate documentation and a CLI, which was an improvement over what was there (or not) before. Other teams used the OpenAPI document to generate SDKs to interact with our service.

In the source code of the Node.js opensource project, lib folder contains JavaScript code, mostly wrappers over C++ and function definitions. On the contrary, src folder contains C++ implementations of the functions, which pulls dependencies from the V8 project, the libuv project, the zlib project, the llhttp project, and many more - which are all placed at the deps folder.

Libuv, the C library that gives Node.js its asynchronous, non-blocking I/O capability is responsible for managing the thread pool. Node.js gives you the capability of using additional threads for computationally expensive and long-lasting operations to avoid blocking the event loop.

Node.js is written in C, C++, and JavaScript. The core components of Node.js - the V8 engine and the libuv library - are written in C++ and C, respectively, since these languages provide low-level access to system resources, making them well-suited for building high-performance and efficient applications. JavaScript is mainly used to write the application logic.

x8 apparently https://github.com/libuv/libuv/pull/3952

Notably upgrades to libuv 1.45 which has io_uring support. Faster file system access! Awhh yeah, it's on.

Remarkable what a mild & unintrusive PR adding io_uring was. https://github.com/libuv/libuv/pull/3952

Well, the single-threaded nature ultimately leads to its biggest downfall. Node.js utilizes a synchronous event loop engineered using Libuv that takes in code from the call stack and executes it.