At the end of March, we had a virtual conference, exocon!
Many modern computers use 64-bit architectures with 64-bit registers, but languages like C have 32-bit ints. So what do the other 32 bits contain when you load a 32-bit into a 64-bit register? @xtex explains this and more in a blog post.
@a: RISC-V was mentioned, yay!
It’s a silly guide for how to open bananas by @a.
Web browsers are insanely complicated. Sure, there’s dozens of different web browsers out there, but they’re mostly all just Chrome in disguise, using the Blink browser engine underneath. @slightknack proposes we need an LLVM project for browser engines, since LLVM democratized writing compilers by providing components and tools to do a lot of the heavy lifting. What if we had something similar for browsers?
@a: This is a bit of a tangent, but Chawan is a browser with a custom engine that runs in a terminal (and can even display images)! Sure, it doesn’t support lots of modern web features, but hey this website at least works in Chawan!
@untrusem wrote a short post about switching to Guix OS, which is kinda like NixOS but using Guile Scheme instead.
@a: I switched to NixOS recently and I’m now a huge fan of atomic updates (I’ve accidentally broken two Linux machines by interrupting them during updates) and rollback (for something as important as my OS, it’s really nice to be able to undo changes). And yeah as @untrusem said, it’s really cool to have my entire OS configuration defined in just a few files.
If you want to discuss anything from this issue, feel free to join our Matrix room and chat with our community!