drewdevault.com

Status-update-July-2021.md (2481B)

---
title: Status update, July 2021
date: 2021-07-15
---
Hallo uit Nederland! I'm writing to you from a temporary workstation in
Amsterdam, pending the installation of a better one that I'll put together after
I visit a furniture store today. I've had to slow a few things down somewhat
while I prepare for this move, and I'll continue to be slower for some time
following it, but things are moving along regardless.
One point of note is that the maintainer for [aerc][0], Reto Brunner, has
stepped down from his role. I'm looking for someone new to fill his shoes;
please [let me know][1] if you are interested.
[0]: https://aerc-mail.org
[1]: mailto:sir@cmpwn.com
As far as the language project is concerned, there has been some significant
progress. We've broken ground on the codegen rewrite, and it's looking much
better than its predecessor. I expect progress on this front to be fairly quick.
In the meanwhile, a new contributor has come onboard to help with floating-point
math operations, and I merged their first patch this morning — adding
math::abs, math::copysign, etc. Another contributor has been working in a
similar space, and sent in an f32-to-string function last week. I implemented
DNS resolution and a "dial" function as well, which you can read about in my
[previous post about a finger client][2].
[2]: /2021/06/24/finger-client.html
I also started writing some POSIX utilities in the new language for fun:
```hare
use fmt;
use fs;
use getopt;
use io;
use main;
use os;
export fn utilmain() (io::error | fs::error | void) = {
	const cmd = getopt::parse(os::args);
	defer getopt::finish(&cmd);
	if (len(cmd.args) == 0) {
		io::copy(os::stdout, os::stdin)?;
		return;
	};
	for (let i = 0z; i < len(cmd.args); i += 1z) {
		const file = match (os::open(cmd.args[i])) {
			err: fs::error => fmt::fatal("Error opening '{}': {}",
				cmd.args[i], fs::strerror(err)),
			file: *io::stream => file,
		};
		defer io::close(file);
		io::copy(os::stdout, file)?;
	};
};
```
We're still looking for someone to contribute in cryptography, and in date/time
support &mdash; please [let me know][1] if you want to help.
In SourceHut news, I have mostly been focused on writing the GraphQL API for
lists.sr.ht. I have made substantial progress, and I had hoped to ship the first
version before publishing today's status updates, but I was delayed due to
concerns with the move abroad. I hope to also have sr.ht available for Alpine
3.14 in the near future.