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Status-update-April-2021.md (2105B)

    

  1. ---
  2. title: Status update, April 2021
  3. date: 2021-04-15
  4. ---
  6. Another month goes by! I'm afraid that I have very little to share this month.
  7. You can check out the [sourcehut "what's cooking" post][0] for sourcehut news,
  8. but outside of that I have focused almost entirely on the programming language
  9. project this month, for which the details are kept private.
  11. [0]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-04-15-whats-cooking-april-2021/
  13. The post [calling for contributors][1] led to a lot of answers and we've brought
  14. several new people on board — thanks for answering the call! I'd like to
  15. narrow the range of problems we still need help with. If you're interested in
  16. (and experienced in) the following problems, we need your help:
  18. [1]: https://drewdevault.com/2021/03/19/A-new-systems-language.html
  20. - Cryptography
  21. - Date/time support
  22. - Networking (DNS is up next)
  24. [Shoot me an email](mailto:sir@cmpwn.com) if you want to help. We don't have the
  25. bandwidth to mentor inexperienced programmers right now, so please only reach
  26. out if you have an established background in systems programming.
  28. Here's a teaser of one of the stdlib APIs written by our new contributors,
  29. unix::passwd:
  31. ```hare
  32. // A Unix-like group file entry.
  33. export type grent = struct {
  34. 	// Name of the group
  35. 	name: str,
  36. 	// Optional encrypted password
  37. 	password: str,
  38. 	// Numerical group ID
  39. 	gid: uint,
  40. 	// List of usernames that are members of this group, comma separated
  41. 	userlist: str,
  42. };
  44. // Reads a Unix-like group entry from a stream. The caller must free the result
  45. // using [grent_finish].
  46. export fn nextgr(stream: *io::stream) (grent | io::EOF | io::error | invalid);
  48. // Frees resources associated with [grent].
  49. export fn grent_finish(ent: grent) void;
  51. // Looks up a group by name in a Unix-like group file. It expects a such file at
  52. // /etc/group. Aborts if that file doesn't exist or is not properly formatted.
  53. //
  54. // See [nextgr] for low-level parsing API.
  55. export fn getgroup(name: str) (grent | void);
  56. ```
  58. That's all for now. These updates might be light on details for a while as we
  59. work on this project. See you next time!