Apartment Found, FLOSS Work, Language Design, Rambling
Apartment hunting is over already.
Looks like I’ll be living in Aspen Chase, off Golfside between Clark and Washtenaw, right next to WCC and US-23 and I-94, plus right near all the cool shopping places and restaurants and Ann Arbor.
I move in at the end of the month. Thinking about throwing an apartment warming / alcohol cabinet stocking party sometime in early-mid January.
So, now I need to ratchet up how much or work (or where I work). I’m also really interested in getting back into FLOSS work. I’m digging through some Ghostscript bounties (two birds, one stone) and seeing if there’s anything a newcomer to the project without much 2D compositing experience can tackle. A few looks like applicable.
After that, I’m unsure. My three biggest favorite things to work on are games, low-level infrastructure and language tools, and usability. FLOSS games are not much interesting to me; I’m not sure why, but for some reason Open Source just doesn’t seem to be working so hot for game projects as it does for everything else. Possibly because artists/designers/musicians aren’t as into the Give It Away For Free thing as programmers are.
So, for low-level stuff, I was at first thinking X and drivers. Then I’m thinking that that tends to be a pain without a second set of hardware, plus the chance of breaking hardware (hopefully rare, but still a possibility, as I’ve heard), and I don’t really have the cash for spare hardware, graphics cards, etc. and I need this one machine to continue working perfectly so my regular job. So maybe that’ll be an option down the road when I have more spare cash.
That pretty much leaves general desktop app work, or work on lower-level desktop code like HAL or D-BUS. Now, while I’m a GNOME fan of their desktop design, I actually really dislike their underlying frameworks. I mean, OO in C certainly works, but… damn is it ugly. Writing desktop software is a very high-level thing to do, and really would be better with a high-level language. Sadly, C# is dead for political reasons, C++ isn’t really all that great (but it certainly blows C out of the water - compare the pleasure that is the Qt API to the glib/gtk API), Java might very well become a good choice soon what with it being Free and IcedTea coming along, but then I’m not a huge fan of Java (C# is Java “done right,” but see afore-mentioned political issues), and so on. Vala looks like a fun projects (language design, low-level framework… my favorite areas) so I might look into that very soon. I’m specially not fond of how it just translates to C (there’s several very good reasons why C++ no longer does that), so maybe giving it an LLVM backend would be spiff, plus I’ve really been wanting to play with LLVM anyway. Actually, working on the clang frontend for LLVM is another option.
There is then always the part of me that just wants to do something new and exciting, but that’s… difficult. Not so much in writing it, but finding something new and exciting and actually worthwhile. I mean, doing all the web work I do, I’d love to have a langauge dedicated solely to doing web work. PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, Perl… all of these are extremely general-purpose languages that have libraries for working on the web, but they still make things more complicated than you really need. (Ruby on Rails does purportedly make things very easy, but then, you’re not so much coding Ruby as you are in a specialized dialect built on top of Ruby - plus, having hacked on the Ruby interpreter in years past, I’m not a fan of the underlying technology, unless Matz and co have done some serious work on it in the last few years… maybe I should take a look.) Really, 90% of what a web app does it spit out HTML and run SQL queries. Those two things should be SUPER easy and the easiest way to do them should also be both the most efficient and the most secure way to do them. Just makes sense. I have ideas on how to do this, so it’s tempting to write mod_languagethatdoesnotsucklikephp… but that gets back to whether the project would really get used much and really be worthwhile or just be yet another niche language used by three people in tiny projects nobody’s ever heard of.
I’m equally tempted to do a more low-level language. D is a neat language, but the design is a little… fluid. Plus its standard library sucks, and of the two competing projects to write a new one, both feature new ways of sucking as well as little chance of ever actually being “standard” (not that anything in D is standard, since its just a dump of whatever features the lead developers think is cool at the moment). I like C, I really do, and I really hate the way that C# and Java force OOP down your throat even for things that aren’t best modeled by OOP, or for things where their object model is not quite the best fit. It would be nice to do C with an enhanced type system that makes OOP possible and easy, but makes other styles of OOP also easy, as well as providing much better high-level data structures than the way C++ does things. Basically, I’d like a language that has high-level features, but also allows low-level programming, unlike Java or C# which put everything on their custom managed runtime. To be completely honest, neither Java nor C# really helps all that much with being portable except for trivial programs, and the security benefits of managed runtimes aren’t nearly as useful as advertised except for applet-like situations (seriously, it’s not really that much harder to write secure code in C than in any managed language, from Python to C# - buffer overflows and other memory-address-based attacks are less likely, but that’s hardly the sole kind of security hole around). But still, there are a bazillion “a better C/C++” projects out there, and even if I do make The Best(tm), how useful is that really going to be in the grand scheme of things?
It thus seems best to focus on something that people will actually use, instead of yet another quasi-academic intellectual-masturbation sort of project. GNOME and LLVM are my top choices. LLVM is a little more up my alley, but GNOME work can be fun. It’s been years since my last patch to GNOME, too. Maybe it’s time to rectify that sad fact.
Not seeing any of that likely until January, though - need to earn some raw cash now and get ready to move into said new apartment in a month. My rent will be going up by $325/month, plus I won’t be splitting utilities or Internet anymore. Yay fun.