mu1 VS iceberg

I got sick of juggling code that migrated from one category to the other, so I wrote a little script that deals with chopping up a large source file into multiple TUs before feeding them to the compiler.

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build2

More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33574154#33575045

This really speaks to me. Modern software is too hard to assemble from source. If you're shipping sources, every moving part you add increases the odds of something going wrong on other people's computers.

It's worth having some skepticism of tools. By making some operations easy, tools encourage them. Build systems make it easy to bloat software. Package managers make it easy to bloat dependencies. This dynamic explains why Python in particular has such a terrible package management story. It's been around longer than Node or Rust, so if they seem better -- wait 10 years!

For many of my side projects I try to minimize moving parts for anyone (usually the '1' is literally true) who tries them out. I work in Unix, and one thing I built is a portable shell script that acts like a build system while being much more transparent about what it does: https://codeberg.org/akkartik/basic-build

When I use this script my build instructions are more verbose, but I think that's a good thing. They're more explicit for newcomers, and they also impose costs that nudge me to keep my programs minimalist.

You can see this build system evolve to add partial builds and parallel builds in one of my projects:

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build0

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build1

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build2

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build3

https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build4

Each of these does the same thing for this one repo -- build it -- but adding successively more bells and whistles.

I think providing just the most advanced version, build4, would do my users a disservice. It's also the most likely to break, where build0 is rock solid. If my builds do break for someone, they can poke around and downgrade to a simpler version.

Totally agreed!

Here's a prototype from a few years ago where I tried to make this easier: https://github.com/akkartik/mu1#readme (read just the first few paragraphs)

I still think the full answer lies in this direction.

Details I didn't include but should have (I wasn't sure I'd have any replies at all... I should have had more faith, sorry)

It's a bit of a ramble, sorry about that.

MSTOICAL[0] is a fork of an old C based Forth variant, it took some help from the HN community[1] to get it to compile in a modern 64 bit environment, for which I am very thankful. However, it uses AutoConf to configure, build, install, etc... and I can't for the life of me figure out how to remove all of that logic. (C isn't my primary language, I'm willing to learn that, but adding AutoConf on top of it was too much)

In order to work on that, I was willing to switch to Linux (Ubuntu)... got everything up and running for the most part, but then I couldn't access WikidPad[2], my local Wiki with my appointments, etc. I missed a doctors appointment because of that, so went back to Windows.

The issue is around wxWindows changing the names of variables in some calls. On Windows, you just download an EXE installer and you're good to go. I couldn't figure it out because the program seems to be unwilling to support newer Python versions. (I could be wrong)

I don't understand why they felt the need to make breaking changes to wxWindows, and the python is a bit too dense for me.

So finally... I'm back in Windows 10, and decided to try to craft together a twitter clone with a bunch of weird ideas that I tossed out at 3:30 am in a twitter thread, and put into a more coherent manifesto.[3]

[0] https://github.com/mikewarot/mstoical

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30957273

[2] https://github.com/WikidPad/WikidPad

[3] https://github.com/mikewarot/iceberg/blob/main/MANIFESTO.md