Geekstorming

It occurs to me that, with my Harmonium project, using the standard C ABI directly isn’t necessarily a win. The C linking model is, shall we say, outdated. To make other languages work with it, I have to use some sort of external definition file to specify a function’s semantics. I can’t just say “function pointer”, I have to say “Function-that-takes-these-type-arguments-and-returns-this pointer.” And any OO is right out.

Because I have to add semantics anyway, it makes sense to go to a higher level; support a simple object model as well, perhaps? Closures? … Continue Reading

Half-baked idea alert!So, I’ve always been rather annoyed with file I/O. Many’s the time I’ve wished for an extendable file manipulation framework with which one could specify any file format, and have it be properly parsed into a nice structure.I was just reading a webpage which referred to UNIX’s “everything’s a file” philosophy as “everything’s an untyped bytestream.” And it occurred to me — why the hell don’t filesystems have type support?I mean, yes, you need to be able to convert to untyped bytestreams to communicate with the rest of the world. … Continue Reading