DEV-DIARIES
Dev Diary 2020-07-06
Every time I learn about another thing that systemd does now (besides being an init system), I wonder how things could have been different. A more permissive license (to get the BSDs on-board), memory-safe language use, an approach that allowed better forward-compatibility. I walked miles while rolling this around in my head.
What got me thinking about systemd again was a little foray into the Fedora 33 changes and seeing that systemd-resolved is going to be enabled by default. This is not totally a surprise - it’s been around for years, but as someone who remembers when systemd first came on the scene as an init system, it’s still weird. Just when I feel like I’ve finally started identifying the higher level problem, I find a blog post that nails the problem so totally. “Technology Holy Wars are a Coordination Problem” is a piece that covers so much more than just systemd - it’s about the platform effect and how changing popularity makes bitrot inevitable. Now that the problem is clearly stated, how can we fix it? Anyhow, enough of me screaming at clouds.
I decided to get off my butt and figure out how to do cross-compilation for Go, and it turns out it’s improved a ton since last I looked. gox pretty much takes all the sting out of the process, and so the entire evening I had planned to set aside for slamming my brain against a keyboard got spent instead watching the new Eurovision movie.
“What are you cross-compiling in Go” you didn’t ask? Well, I did a rewrite of the coffeeoutside bot in Go, and needed a tidy little Linux executable at the end. I’m hoping that the maintenance effort will pay off, but honestly I doubt it. I think the payoff will come in standardizing all my little weird little home projects into go, and having a nice little CI process to go with it (but more on that later.)
Cool Links
Technology Holy Wars are a Coordination Problem
Hoo boy this one has some real bangers:
So let’s consider a subtler problem, which is that the success of one platform indirectly harms others by wresting away shared resources.
Technical fixes like type systems can help reduce bitrot by identifying precisely where things have changed dangerously, but there is always a system outside the type system, and the only truly end-to-end test is the end-user.
icdiff - improved color diff
Side-by-side color terminal diffs - drops into git nicely!