most BEAM languages actually settle on erlang abstract format. you'd think core erlang would be more common since it feels more like a traditional functional IR, but basically only LFE does this, because it's a moving target without any particular stability guarantees from release to release.

1: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/erl_parse.html#t:abst...

2: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/qlc.html#q/2

3: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/syntax_tools/merl.html

brutal. hope major compiler vendors throw in a flag that can bring some sanity to this

- fstar: 3k stars, 267 forks

- coalton: 1.8k stars, 111 forks

- carp: 6k stars, 267 forks

- c3: 5.8k stars, 400 forks

when something is novel/young (not having had time to grow large and accumulate issues in the vein of "1 doc page out of 1000 is worded incorrectly") and (as of yet) niche (innate barrier to entry for contribution because you have to learn from square 1 what all the moving parts look like), you don't see the same activity patterns on public source hosts as with a general-purpose language.

remember hacktoberfest 2020? that's just all public-facing source 365 days a year now, except instead of "updated README.md" it's some vaguely-plausible fix... then you read the PR body and someone couldn't even be bothered to, or, just as likely couldn't explain it themselves. and that sort of sinking dread sets in.

you should read this less as convincingly adversarial fashion and more fashion inspired by the vague concept of computer-vision-aided surveillance, which, mind you, is still pretty rad, just more vogue material, less ieee spectrum material

come now, surely you understand why it would be beneficial to the commons to have a snappy, catchy term that already has purchase in the public imagination be free to use, right?

    2. Fork the upstream project (optionally remove other -- now useless :^) -- build scripts),

    Make / GNUMake / CMake / autoconf / bash scripts / batch scripts / powershell scripts: Zig is a complete build system that works on all supported platforms and can do everything those other tools do.

i am begging people to please stop doing this genre of "compatibility" initiative.

[0] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Shantell+Sans

personally, i used gentoo throughout most of my teenage years, and now use nixos viewing it as a successor, since you can screw around using the thing as a meta-distribution, but roll back when you hose your system.

gentoo freebsd existed for a while for funsies but nobody cared and now it's dead, same with gentoo openbsd. each was portage integrated a little more intentionally on top of a respective bsd than just "bung it in /usr/local/bin and call it a day". practically speaking, they were implementations of gnu/k*bsd.

nixbsd similarly exists (nix deeply integrated into freebsd), with heroic efforts made to transfer nixos's abstraction over init systems for system-wide configuration; last commit was two months ago so i guess not dead yet?

you can run nix on gentoo, or gentoo prefix on nixos with nix-ld turned on if you feel like it

void's claim to fame with xbps is a bunch of sandboxing and bind mounts for build environments. nix already has to sandbox just to get off the ground wrt reproducibility.

void, gentoo, and nixos all offer some degree of libc freedom. on void it's first-class, on gentoo it nearly is, and on nixos it's here be dragons. libc freedom doesnt really jive with using a bsd as a base; vertical integration is kind of one of the contemporary selling points.

so to answer your question, the result would be nixbsd in an alternate timeline where nixpkgs's analogues to USE flags/eselect/profiles are not hot garbage (i say this with love as a user), and void would fail to exert a phenotype.

back in my time as an (inadvisably) precociously online kid, the only real age barrier was having a credit card, so i had to beg/borrow/steal my way to someone on irc giving me a shell to a vps, and pay some other rando with a steam gift card to buy a domain then transfer it to my registrar account. and like that, i could start developing a presence in whatever online communities i insinuated myself into by acting mature enough nobody gave my age a second thought. physical realities like divorce and school troubles came and went, but moving and shaking online gave me my most steadfast friends and s/o to this day.

shift the timeframe a couple decades and i would have instead been gated by an id upload. bleak.

i recently made use of plenty of ugly tricks in this vein to take a single authoritative table of macro invocations that defined a bunch of pixel formats, and make them graduate from defining bitfield structs to classes with accessors that performed good old fashioned shifts and masks, all without ever specifying the individual bit offsets of channels, just their individual widths, and macro magic did the rest. no templates, no actual c++, could just as feasibly produce pure c bindings down the line by just changing a few names.

getting really into this stuff makes you stop thinking of c function-like macros as functions of their arguments as such, but rather unary functions of argument lists, where arity roughly becomes the one notion vaguely akin to typing in the whole enterprise, or at least the one place where the compiler exhibits behaviour resembling that of a type checker. this was especially true considering the entries in the table i wound up with were variadic, terminating in variably many (name, width) parenthesised tuples. and i just... had the means to "uncons" them so to speak. fun stuff.

this is worth it, imo, in precisely one context, which is: you want a single source of truth that defines fiddly but formulaic implementations spread across multiple files that must remain coordinated, and this is something you do infrequently enough that you don't consider it worthwhile introducing "real" "big boy" code gen into your build process. mind, you usually do end up having to commit to a little utility header that defines convenient macros (_Ex and such in the article), but hey. c'est la vie. basically x macros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_macro) on heart attack quantities of steroids.