The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol XMPP is like the web. It is far too complex to be implemented in one program with the Unix philosophy in mind. But like the web, you have to deal with it. It is the only open and widely used instant messaging protocol on the internet. Its extensibility is the main reason that an implementation in a single program is nearly impossible. This talk described an approach to master this problem.
suckless.org e.V. Mitgliederversammlung (suckless.org e.V. general assembly) The yearly general assembly consisted of the report of the chairs, Anselm R Garbe and Laslo Hunhold, the report of the treasurer, Jan Klemkow, and the discussion of topics raised by members.
stali learnings and beehive observation, Anselm R Garbe This talk presented the experience gained with stali since the last slcon, discussing new goals and why self-bootstrappability is a bad idea in particular. As a proof of concept, the presenter demonstrated stali as a platform for observing his beehives.
scc and qbe for practical compilation, Roberto E. Vargas Caballero. For decades we have been witnessing a dramatic increase in compiler complexity. Popular compilers have become huge C++ programs trying to incorporate every aspect of state-of-the-art research. This talk proposed scc and qbe as a new approach to compilation, where simplicity and predictability are the primary objective over reckless efficiency and optimization. It presented the security benefits resulting from this alternative design approach, that is also advocated by the "boring crypto" movement, and demonstrated how it allows easier bootstrapping of new systems.
This talk discussed UTF-8 and its history, how and when you have to deal with it and which challenges had been faced along the way, evaluating its advantages over other character encodings. Besides more trivial problems like decoding and encoding, advanced issues like string comparison, case conversion and normalization were discussed, leading to the conclusion that the POSIX wchar-interfaces are broken by design. Using suckless principles, problems with the ICU libraries were discussed and a midway drawn between total localization and minimalism, presenting possible solutions.
Mainstream XML processing techniques wastefully consume time and memory for example in file format conversions popularly known as 'save as...'. This talk presented a less wasteful method based on finite-state transducers.