Weeknotes 158

After the nosedive of December I’m pulling back hard on the stick and beginning the long climb back to cruising altitude.

It’s winter and I haven’t had the heating on for two weeks now. This is in theory financially convenient but otherwise a bit worrying.

I went to the January LRUG on Monday, stopping beforehand for beers with one Chris and two Matts. The meeting itself was good, particularly the garbage collection talk by one of the Matts.

I chickened out of going to the pub afterwards and immediately regretted it. The room was crowded and I felt a bit overwhelmed by all the familiar faces but it’s clear in hindsight that I should’ve made more of the opportunity to talk to people.

I’ve decided I’ll make an effort to be more sociable next time.

On Wednesday I had a restorative lunch and stomp through the Peckham rain with Matt (a third) who’s also looking for what’s next. Born Slippy .NUXX played in the café as we ate.

Thursday afternoon was tea in Holborn with Mona; Friday morning was coffee in Kings Cross with Joel. Both were excellent and I got reassuringly cold on my bike.

Two streams again. I got seven more test files passing, which is decent progress, but the second session was a struggle. I had to make some unprincipled compromises in the parser to support inline abbreviations for import and export because e.g. both (export … (global …)) and (global (export …) …) generate a global variable export, with the latter also generating the variable definition itself. The existing mess with identifier contexts makes everything more difficult too.

It’s far too late to back out of it now, but if I was doing this project again I might skip the WebAssembly text format altogether and just write an interpreter for the binary format, since the details of parsing the idiosyncratic text format are sucking up so much energy and parsers aren’t even interesting to begin with. I suppose it’s all part of the completely unnecessary challenge.

Assuming I’m stuck with this parser for now, I’m undecided about how to deal with abbreviations. I’ve been handling them ad hoc and that’s becoming more complicated as time goes on; it would certainly be tidier and more systematic to desugar them all in a dedicated preprocessing phase, but then I worry I’ll be duplicating syntax knowledge (e.g. static instruction arity) across multiple phases.

In reality I’m probably lazy enough to double down on the ad hoc approach and see how far I can get with sheer bloody-mindedness without having to think of anything clever. It’s got me this far! In life! And that was just the teachers!

I enjoyed this hour-long explainer of spline continuity because it’s entertaining and accessible and makes good use of the mathematical jargon “yeets off to fucking wherever”.

The Menu: again, I‘m grateful to see anything that’s a bit different and has been made with style and care, but fundamentally this film is a silly idea not very well executed, and it’s nowhere near as clever or funny as it thinks it is. I kept wanting — or even expecting — it to get great, but it never did. Not bad but also not good.

Anya Taylor-Joy’s good at acting though isn’t she? Might be time to rewatch The Witch.

Because I originally read them in the twenty-minute window between being published and updated, I’d missed the bit from Alice’s November weeknotes where she relates her claim that I “only have one mouth”. I didn’t notice until I dug out that post this week for unrelated reasons and it made me laugh.

We apologise for the oversight. Better late than never.