2022-05 Status Update

on 2022-06-01 in status-update

| alpine | sourcehut | midi |

Contributions ¶

builds.sr.ht ¶

alpine-conf is now accepting timezone as an arg, instead of a flag (from commit 3b793bb). This broke the edge build of alpine image of builds.sr.ht; which I fixed.

I was figuring out a way to show code metrics of one of my go modules. I proposed a feature to be added to builds.sr.ht in detail, which got rejected due to the complexity involved in its implementation and its narrow scope.

• [PATCH builds.sr.ht] alpine: run setup-timezone conditionally
• [RFC] Build Attributes

wlgreet ¶

I tried packaging wlgreet for alpine linux. But it was failing at runtime with segfaults. It is written in rust and uses wayland-rs. I wasn’t familiar enough with it to be able to fix the issue. I published my work for others to pick up.

• testing/wlgreet: new aport

Projects ¶

go-midi ¶

I worked on this project whole month. Exploring various designs that optimize for performance while still exposing a pleasant to work with public API. Since I want to dive deep into how the library works, I think posts explaining it are better suited as a separate series.

To give an overview, go-midi has:

• minimum possible memory allocations
• zero heap allocations on hot code paths
• every input typed and validated
• all serialized MIDI messages spec compliant
• no bounds checks
• most functions inlinable by the compiler

Support for MIDI 2.0 is planned but is not yet implemented.

I’ll also write a separate post about MIDI 2.0 and how I think it will change the future of digital music.

Conclusion ¶

I came to know about FSCI from a fellow Free Software Hacker Sai Karthik. I was pleasantly surprised to see many people from India sharing similar values about software freedom. If you’re interested knowing more or sharing something interesting, do join us.

I started using swaylock and swaylockd to lock my laptop when I’m away. If you’re wondering why I wasn’t using a screen-lock all this time, you’re not alone.

A friend of mine, Chintan, brought his MIDI keyboard last week and we jammed using fluidsynth and pipewire.

I felt quite productive this month. I tinkered with several prototypes of go-midi; learned a lot about go’s garbage collection, escape analysis, bounds check elimination, code generation, and code inlining. Last month’s vacation has played a huge role in this increased productivity.

Until next post. Peace.

I welcome your feedback or constructive criticism to ~dhruvin/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht. You can also visit the public archive.