Assuming that it’s just that person, that it’s their actual name and that they’re in the US…

That was fast.

The company didn’t abandon, Microsoft bought them out indirectly and killed the competition. Nothing to see here.

ANTLR is for writing parsers. You don’t need a new custom parser, just use an existing XML parser.

There are IDE extensions that show the diff of the entire PR locally without having to squash anything. So yes, it’s weird to reinvent a square wheel.

I am currently writing a C compiler, with my own backend (and hopefully, frontend) in OCaml.

But why write your own C frontend? It’s much more of a pain than people imagine. I maintain a C frontend implemented in OCaml (the project itself goes back 25 years) and it’s still not on par with GCC or Clang.

For any other language, sure, but C has so many “wonderful” features, starting with the lexer hack. Your grammar conveniently overlooks this issue but it’s something you’ll have to deal with to actually implement it. So it simply won’t be as nice as theory suggests.

Yes, but with things like syscalls it’s easier to do this than require every high-level thing building on the syscall to be modified and recompiled. Very few people need to use such low-level APIs.

These include semgrep, ast-grep, LLMs, and one-off scripts. After running these tools on a large code-base, you usually end up with lots of additional unintended changes. These range from formatting/whitespace to unrequested modifications by LLMs.

Maybe LLMs do, but why would semgrep or your one-off script be making unrelated changes? This is like using sed to replace something and using grep to filter out the very things you just specifically modified. It should be unnecessary if you commit frequently enough and don’t do 10 different refactorings before starting to commit each one.

keep mum about energy use

Whose mum?

Visit takeout.google.com and select Google Podcasts to export your Google Podcasts data in OPML format.

I wonder when that became a thing. I migrated at the beginning of the year and had to manually add all subscriptions because Google Podcasts had no way of exporting anything.

I guess someone made a GDPR complaint.

The proof of work is the commit content itself! Unlike some arbitrary brute force task of no value.

I might be the minority who was affected by this but how they handled the physical goodies last year was the last straw for me. Unlike all the spammy contributions that rush to it, I didn’t rush creating some pointless PRs on the first day or whatever. My last PR finished its embargo period a few days before the end of October. They even sent out a congratulations email, but when I clicked the link and went to the website there wasn’t anything there. Only when I checked their discord, I saw others with the same confusion and someone semi-officially saying they might’ve run out. It’s obvious they didn’t even ever consider running out and had no system in place to handle that.

Other than that, some of the rules they introduced in recent years were also so detrimental to meaningful PRs even though they thought it’d motivate that, instead of spammy PRs. Clearly that didn’t work at all and actually had the opposite effect in some cases. It was a lot easier to get spammy PRs counted than meaningful ones.

I could rant in more detail about the latter if you’re interested, but I’ll refrain right now.

Nice that someone’s happy about it. As a long time open source contributor and maintainer, I gave up this year because it’s gone downhill.

People just nuke a local git repo and reclone if something goes wrong. There isn’t even an attempt to understand anything.

Clearly not enough active ones for each and every project out there.

Most translations are contributed by external users for languages that the project developers don’t speak themselves, so they can’t always check everything unless there’s multiple active translators for one language.

That wasn’t my statement… Stop intentionally misinterpreting what people say!

Privacy isn’t just about your device not emitting signals… If you don’t want your device and apps to track your location, you also don’t want to receive those GPS signals.

Automatically determining a semantic version bump (based on the types of commits landed).

That’s overly optimistic. It’ll be wrong the moment one person forgets one exclamation mark in one commit message. And it might not even be their fault if it’s not clear at the time it causes breaking changes somewhere downstream.

You can’t replace proper release engineering.

They told you to go to the city centre, not the refugee camp…