My friend and former colleague has built a bunch of stuff over magic-wormhole like fowl[0], shwim[1] and so on. There is a lot of nice work on "dilated" wormhole.

[0] <https://github.com/meejah/fowl>

[1] <https://github.com/meejah/shwim>

...and also "Git-WithMe" for peer-to-peer, one-off Git usage: https://sr.ht/~meejah/git-withme/

There are pre-build packages for OSX, most GNU/Linux distros. I have built it on Windows using the "Microsoft C/C++ compiler for python" that Microsoft makes available for gratis download.

Have you tried Gridsync, a GUI for Tahoe-LAFS?

https://github.com/gridsync/gridsync

I have been reading it as well. For my taste, it is a bit too verbose.

I like to see something along the lines of the K&R book or the GoPL book. I was hoping that "Programming Rust" is such a book, but I was disappointed. And (may be it is just me) I like to see exercises in Programming books.

C an Go are pretty concise languages so they lend themselves to K&R and GoPL. Rust is a big language (like C++) and is still changing quite a bit so I don't think you'll get a similar tome in the near future. (imo)

Happy to see the modules chapter and the testing chapter early enough in the book.

Thanks. The new format looks a lot better, IMHO.

Reminds me of the ancient Indian parable in Panchatantra - http://panchatantra.org/of-crows-and-owls/the-brahmin-and-th...

One of the authors of Tahoe-LAFS and the original creator of zfec, Zooko, co-authored a paper on the performance of such codes.

http://nisl.wayne.edu/Papers/Tech/code-pf-fast09.pdf

Luigi Rizzo is the original author of the fec C library.

I co-maintain zfec (and the Debian package of it) along with Zooko. A new release of zfec is planned to be out soonish.

edit: removing the <> delimiters around the URL. Sorry!

HN sadly does not support <> URL delimiters, so your link ends up 404. Here is it without delimiters:

http://nisl.wayne.edu/Papers/Tech/code-pf-fast09.pdf

Thanks. Updated the link.

People who believe in these ideas are a minority, it seems. Every 'aptitude safe-upgrade' tells me that more and more disk space is required to install the packages.

OpenBSD project seem to be doing the right thing (as they always did, imho) by deleting a lot of code from the base and not letting it to rot.

Good points.

As a programmer, one has no choice most of the time on what language a program should have been written, in my career, I have mostly been modifying and adding code than writing new code from scratch. This mostly means C, for anything close to hardware, as electrical/electronics engineers are familiar with it. Another way of saying this is that, "I program in whatever language, my team is programming in".

Embedded systems also have size limitations and the problem of bootstrapping on new hardware. C has time and again proven to be easy.

If you examine a typical GNU/Linux distro, you see all kinds of programs written in C that ought to have been written in a type safe language because most of the time, C's features were not required for the program.

I wish more and more "new" programs are written in all kinds of languages (not just Rust, but in Python or Haskell or OCaml ..) other than C and that we restrict C to the things we really need it for.

Overall, knowledge of C is only going to help. Whether you want to use it to use it for your next project is something that depends on the problem at hand.

> Overall, knowledge of C is only going to help. Whether you want to use it to use it for your next project is something that depends on the problem at hand.

Of course! To be clear, I'm not arguing against learning C in general. I'm very happy that I learned C.

I'm arguing against the point made in the post that you should learn C over newer languages. And like I said, "shit my codebase is in C" (i.e. point #1 from the post) is a totally valid reason to learn C. The other points are not.

netsurf?

The essence of the language has not changed. But C99 came out with a few nice things. There is also C11 which brought in a few new things as well. It would have been nice to bring the book up to C99.

"Modern C" is a good book on some of the new features.

    http://icube-icps.unistra.fr/img_auth.php/d/db/ModernC.pdf

After reading up on C99 I take back what I said. I definitely thought some of those features were older than they are.