Hacker News: anardil

New comment by anardil in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

anardil — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:16:04 +0000

https://goto.anardil.net/ - Launchpad for all my other (16!) sites.

The main ones are:

https://diving.anardil.net/ - Scuba diving picture gallery; organized by timeline, common name, taxonomy, and more

https://dnd.anardil.net/ - Artifacts from my groups' D&D games

https://pirates.anardil.net/ - Pirate insult generator

https://alchemy.anardil.net/ - Morrowind (TES 3) alchemy calculator

New comment by anardil in "Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell"

anardil — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 20:01:34 +0000

I'll admit it's mostly this way because I thought ExistentialQuantification sounded cool and wanted to give a try with classes - this could definitely be tidied up

New comment by anardil in "Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell"

anardil — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 19:45:33 +0000

The rules were different in 2014 when I made my account! It's actually quite annoying because lots of 3rd party GitHub integrations puke immediately saying I have an invalid username.

New comment by anardil in "Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell"

anardil — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 16:46:54 +0000

Thank you for the suggestion, I'll give this a whirl! I've fussed around with `--ghc-options '-optl-static -fPIC'` and the like in years past without success.

New comment by anardil in "Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell"

anardil — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 16:27:36 +0000

You're right! Data.ByteString.Lazy is Word8 under the covers, so wide characters are truncated. tr takes a similar short cut. Swapping to Data.Text would fix that.

Where simplicity conflicted with compatibility, I've chosen the former so far. Targeting the BSD options and behavior is another example of that. The primary goal is to feel out the data flow for each utility, rather than dig into all the edges.

New comment by anardil in "Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell"

anardil — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 16:14:00 +0000

Definitely. Depending on how long you've spent staring at the contents of /bin/ and /usr/bin/ you'll notice there are definitely some array or matrix oriented utils (or options) missing like column.

cut comes to mind as a difficult one. In C, you can just hop around the char buffer[] and drop nulls in place for fields, etc before printing. You could go that way a Data.Array Char, but that's hard to justify as functional.

New comment by anardil in "Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell"

anardil — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 16:00:32 +0000

I'll have to give this a try, thank you for the suggestion!

New comment by anardil in "Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell"

anardil — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 16:00:11 +0000

It definitely has some sharp edges. One advantage is skipping computations (and the IO they'd need) that don't end up getting used, which let's you do some clever looking things/ ignore some details. That's hard to take advantage of in practice, I think.

The other advantage is just deferring IO. For instance in split or tee, you could decide that you need 500 output files and open all the handles together in order to pass them to another function that will consume them. I'd squint at someone who wrote `void process_fds(int fds[500]);`, but here it doesn't matter.

New comment by anardil in "Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell"

anardil — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 15:53:01 +0000

Thank you! This is one of my favorites. User declared variables are next on the todo list, when I get back to it.

New comment by anardil in "Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell"

anardil — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 15:52:23 +0000

Performance (execution, memory) is generally in the same ballpark as the BSD versions, with some caveats specific to utils that do lots of in place data manipulation.

cut comes to mind as an example, slicing and dicing lines into fields quickly without a ton of copies isn't easy. Using Streaming.ByteString generally makes a huge difference, but it's extremely difficult to use unless you get can your mind to meld with the types it wants. Picking it up again months later takes some serious effort.

New comment by anardil in "Unix core utilities implemented in Haskell"

anardil — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 12:41:18 +0000

Wow, hello! This is my repository. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Show HN: Configurable Pirate Insult Generator

anardil — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 16:56:57 +0000

Arr HN! I had a need for pirate themed insults for a D&D campaign last year and put together a generator using recursive templating. Generations are scored on a couple axes (vulgarity, viciousness, intelligence) so the output can be tailored to a particular situation. There isn't any AI at work here.

I have a new blog post with a lot more detail on how it works:

https://www.anardil.net/2023/pirate-insults.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36837205

Points: 3

# Comments: 1