| HN Mirror

Subscribed to Claude a few months ago. I immediately started working with it on my programming language. Since then, I've implemented a compacting garbage collector, a size class based memory allocator, a unified value heap, deeply optimized hash tables and even implemented shapes like V8 and Self, redesigned the value representation, created a Common Lisp style condition system, implemented UTF-8 text decoding, refined the generators API, increased the number of tests from ~200 to ~1200 and improved the test suite to the point it runs all of those tests in parallel in under two seconds, implemented stack protection support, added an aarch64 matrix to the GitHub CI, fixed a zillion bugs, improved performance, perfected tail call optimization. I did so much stuff I'm probably forgetting some. And these aren't "lol just do it" prompts either, I'm putting effort into refining design and implementation. I review every line. Just finished designing safe hash table iteration in spite of mutability: generation counters that get bumped whenever the table is reallocated. It's actually gonna be more powerful than what other languages do. Next up on my todo list is to implement my language's unified pattern matcher, static allocation for all interpreter internal data in order to get rid of all initialization code and achieve nearly zero startup time, and then finally a bytecode interpreter to close the performance gap on the likes of Python.

Dramatically improved my static site generator Pugneum to the point it's better than markdown and added Atom and RSS feeds, used it to write several articles about my language. Pace is so fast I actually need to write those articles by hand in order to crystalize the knowledge I learned. If I don't I'm afraid I'll just forget everything. No LLMs for the articles themselves, but they sure as hell took all the pain away from writing them. Pugneum even has back references and table of contents generation now. Claude even helped me refine my website's CSS, something I'm not very good at.

Also created my own invoicing system for $DAYJOB so I can invoice companies from my terminal. Started a decompilation project for my cherished childhood games and I've already almost finished decompiling one game's engine after just a few days. Been working on my cyberdeck project too, this one's a bit slow because I got to the point where I'll actually need to spend money on it to move forward. All this inside the rootless development virtual machine system built on top of QEMU and systemd that I developed together with Claude, whose network isolation I'm currently hardening. Started reverse engineering my laptop again! And I'm actually making progress! Made a color scheme app for the keyboard LEDs controller I made many years ago, with loads and loads of color schemes! Found some kind of bug in my keyboard while doing it, in less than an hour I had the root cause and a fix applied locally, sent the fix to systemd, it got merged. Planning to ramp up my free and open source software participation as well now that exploring codebases is a breeze. Already have some mesa patches ready for upstream. Have been playing with strace since I use it so much.

Better?