millsteed's comments

millsteed | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: What to use to build an iOS and Android app?

Have a look at Flutter.

millsteed | 2 years ago | on: Konilo: A personal computing system in Forth

I think it’s Adorn Roman by Laura Worthington.

millsteed | 2 years ago | on: Dart/Flutter now has macros/metaprogramming

I mainly just trust Bob Nystrom (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=munificent) to keep this thing on the rails. He's an excellent language designer.

millsteed | 2 years ago | on: Dart/Flutter now has macros/metaprogramming

Exactly. I use it for a full stack mobile app development. Backend and frontend can share code. Server can be compiled to a single machine code binary.

millsteed | 2 years ago | on: Dart/Flutter now has macros/metaprogramming

Don't discount the developer experience too. With the codegen annotations, you either have to check in your .g.dart files to git which could be stale and break compilation in CI, or have them generate in CI, which is unnecessarily slow and eats up CI minutes. Added bonus is the macro API is less complex than the codegen API.

millsteed | 2 years ago | on: Dart/Flutter now has macros/metaprogramming

Yeah, it is. It inspired the reflection in Dart, which inspired the macros. You can only use Dart's reflection when running in VM mode though. Flutter apps use AOT compilation, due to tree-shaking, so you lose the reflection and fall back to having to run codegen - kind of like TypeScript -> JS. This is a nice improvement that is run in memory before compilation and allows better access to the AST.

millsteed | 2 years ago | on: Dart/Flutter now has macros/metaprogramming

Yeah, I get that. I think they were burned by having to do https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html and https://google.github.io/styleguide/javaguide.html.

millsteed | 2 years ago | on: Dart/Flutter now has macros/metaprogramming

Thanks for linking the spec. It has been a living document for a long time. I discovered that the implementation had made it into the SDK's master branch. Since it's very early stage and lacking documentation, I made this repo which demonstrates creating a macro that implements some of the most popular codegen functionality Flutter developers use.

millsteed | 2 years ago | on: Orathan: Cloud Without the Rent

Cloud costs have not kept up with Moore's Law and it is cheaper per year to own bare metal servers. Most developers just want to build their app and not worry about sysadmin. The cloud provides nice abstractions like consoles, CLIs and APIs.

When I moved out of the cloud, I wanted something like an Oxide Computer, but a rack starts at $500k. A lot of people have asked Oxide if they can buy a single sled - but that's not Oxide's focus at this stage of their strategy.

So I bought a Dell and administrated it myself and developed a lot of custom software to manage containers and databases. That's not the experience I want for others, so I've started Orathan to give developers the cloud experience on bare metal.