Weeknotes 154

After I hit publish on my weeknotes last Sunday, I went to the window and saw it snowing heavily. It’s strange how quiet the road outside gets when it’s blanketed with snow.

It’s since melted into sludge and the noise from the buses and sirens and drunks is back to normal.

Work got in the way of streaming this week — rude — and I could only fit in one session on Friday night. I struggled to get my brain back up to speed but did eventually make another couple of test files pass. Satisfying.

I still haven’t escaped the WebAssembly abstract syntax parser because it’s more complicated than I’d expected. The complexity I mentioned earlier was made worse by the discovery that any block expression can declare its function type, i.e. how many stack values it consumes and produces, which means that more type definitions can be generated while parsing function bodies, not just the function signatures themselves.

That makes for a weird situation where the module’s initial identifier context (which is populated by its type definitions) is repeatedly revised as the module’s function definitions are parsed, until you reach a fixed point containing all the typedefs needed by the function signatures and bodies.

At the moment this means my code’s a right old mess of things being mutated all over the place, but I hope once it’s all working I can take a moment to properly understand the dependencies and put the steps in a nice linear order so it’s more obvious what’s going on.

I finally worked out how to disable notifications for splits on my watch, which has (I think?) silenced the last of its annoying interruptions during exercise. What a relief! I wish it was easier to put the watch into this quiet state by default; getting pointlessly notified about splits or Activity goals is distracting at the best of times and literally dangerous when I’m cycling.

Speaking of, my bike became knackered enough that I got it serviced for the first time post-COVID, and now it’s good as new.

I saw Barbarian and thought it was excellent. Georgina Campbell’s performance in particular is great, but everyone else is good too and it makes the most of its small cast and setting. The overall pacing and tone worked well for me — at one point it got so unpleasantly tense that I came really close to turning it off, but then a quick tonal shift arrived at just the right time to pull me back in.

I like it when films are unpredictable and this one definitely was. (I just watched the trailer and, unsurprisingly, it basically ruins it.)

It’s Christmas in a week. I’m not even slightly ready.

Zero mince pies.