Yvan SRAKA’s Blog

• GPG / SSH
• GitHub¹ / Mastodon

Congratulations, you found me on the Internet!²

Here you can find³ things I’ve already written about:

• One step forward, an easier interoperability between Rust and Haskell on Jan 26, 2023
• Contracts in Nix on Aug 28, 2022

And, a non-exhaustive, unordered, (a.) stack of drafted posts about half-baked experiments⁴:

• Some future overengineering for this website: topinambour (an HTTP server), salsifi (a static generator), and rutabaga (a TUI web browser)
• I gave a sneak peek at a toy compiler at FOSDEM 2024⁵, which will, of course, feature all the cool stuff everyone is talking about: a predictable generational GC that uses by default a custom arena allocator, memory regions enforced by an incremental abstract interpretation at the semantic level, ergonomic types as values, and a minimal, hackable, bootstrappable, and portable implementation
• A decentralized VCS, a Bourne shell, and a pass reimplementation, all aimed to demonstrate that we can write real-world software in the programming language teased just before.

Finally, (b.) stuff I’ll start working on next (hopefully soon™):

• I gave some talks on Nix and am currently playing a lot with Guix. So, naturally, I have my own set of ideas on how I would write the perfect package manager. But first, a cool name, what about chataigne?
• A playground inspired by Jupyter Notebook that guarantees you can always reproduce the results you see
• A hackable TUI text editor (currently called e-max as a joke), and a GUI Note and To-Do app that better fits my needs than what I’ve used so far. This is also an excuse to hack with gjs (and maybe convince some people not to use Electron)
• Video games that use pre-rendering tricks to display cool graphics on cheap hardware, that’s not so new, but I have some funny ideas for a few short VR games that would target old phones and Cardboard
• E-ink hardware and software (that could replace both my laptop and phone) and a keyboard-driven live music setup
• A book about hum computer stuff, or a better version of my systems programming lecture that was hosted under https://rust.systems
• An OS from scratch (please don’t let me do that).

I will try really hard to finish at least one item on the (a.) list before starting one on the (b.) list, or worse, one not yet on the list …⁶

At some point, this website might have other categories in the navigation header, like “Recipes,” “Zines,” or “Videos” (trying hard to find hobbies other than CS). And a controversial “Opinions” section where I can try to express my political thoughts while maximizing the time before the future me cringes re-reading it :’)