Arcan 0.7.1 – Minutes To Midnight
50 points by vimpostor
50 points by vimpostor
Very sad to hear about moonchild. I didn’t know him well but he seemed very cool from the little bit we interacted and knew so much about transactional memory
Oh, I missed that my read through. Is this lobster's Moonchild: https://lobste.rs/~Moonchild? Sad indeed, either way :-/
It is :c
Didn’t know he was that young. He was knowledgeable on many topics (I recall he linked to his blog at https://outerproduct.net/ on occasion)! RIP, just so tragic.
Wow... very sad indeed. He helped me out quite a few times on freenode/libera with PLT questions. He was incredibly knowledgeable but always so humble -- really left an impression on me and made me want to be a better programmer. RIP.
It has been quite a while since we switched from GitHub to Fossil for development. Since we don’t expect people to tool around an uncommon tool we also mirror to git hosted on Codeberg.
A final friendly warning to packagers is to use those repositories. The ones on GitHub will no longer receive any mirror updates and any changes over there are likely to be of a more incendiary nature.
Now I want to know what the incendiary changes will be...
Probably deleting them if I had to guess.
letoram likes Fossil, but kept GitHub around out of necessity. Now he’s replacing it with codeberg so I imagine he’s going to delete or archive them at some point
What I find interesting is how many people are moving away from GitHub these days. I think it's actually a wise move given the toxicity on the platform. If anyone wants a fun, fun read, just look at why they don't do IPv6! It's like a 10,000 word thread.
GitHub can't even implement simple bare minimum core product features like stacked diffs and move tracking for more than a decade, how do you expect them to do something like IPv6!
Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments. Boot splash screen? no problem. Custom Interface for your Home Automation Project? sure thing. Stream media processing? Of course.
It has been used in a number of both experimental, hobby, academic research and commercial projects and products alike, in areas ranging from VR desktops to industrial computer vision systems for robotic automation.
I’m not familiar at all but it looks a bit like everything to the point I still have no idea what that project is nor if I should care about it or not.
I’ve been wanting to write a blog post on this for a little while now, it’s very hard for me to conceptualize, but I can try:
Its core is a scene graph that can handle live video and audio, which can be used for tasks like desktop compositing (drawing windows in the right places, their decorations etc.) as well as implementing things like games and “apps” directly, as opposed to using a separate framework like QT.
The scene graph is manipulated by Lua code that the user can edit and swap out.
There’s also a lot of progress in networking, where various layers of the stack can be sent over the network and share state with instances running on different devices. So eg, the scene graph commands can be run on one device and rendered on another, or eg. the pixels are generated on one and sent over the wire like VNC with input coming from a third device, or a lot of different combinations it’s extremely flexible.
This is maybe half of it at best, there’s a lot there but kinda hard to piece through
Super interesting architecture imo, if you want to see one vision of a user focused computer it’s worth checking out.
I would love to be able to send desktop windows to say a computer hooked up to my TV.
That's exactly what arcan is best at!
Bjorn has a crazy (cool) setup where all web browsing is isolated on a separate machine that reimages itself every time the window gets closed. Essentially impossible for malware to stick. I think about that a lot.
Would totally read a more complete blogpost about it
This is the most complete introduction: https://arcan-fe.com/2020/12/03/arcan-versus-xorg-feature-parity-and-beyond/