Paged Out!

Playing with 'minimal' ways to add templates/generics/reflection to C has become a bit of a dumb hobby of mine (in this case shared/enabled by Akshay!).

Gamma was an experiment in templates without having to parse C. This led to some big annoyances that I guess aren't mentioned on that site but are in the PagedOut page[1]: when you instantiate a template "bar::[struct foo]" Gamma does a pretty bad job of knowing to copy the definition of "struct foo" (and all type definitions that "struct foo" depends on) from the caller into the template before compiling the instantiated template. (It gets even worse with circular dependencies, e.g., a "struct tree_node" that contains a "list::[struct tree_node]".)

More recently I've been writing MaC[2], which solves those problems by fully parsing the "header file" for each template. So it knows about all of the types in the program and can copy them between template instantiations as needed, but in the "main body" of the template you can use arbitrary GNU-C features. This has been a lot more reliable. As a test program for it I'm currently in the middle of writing an LR[k] parser generator[3] in MaC.

The big thing that gets annoying about all of these "don't-parse-the-code" approaches is there's no good way to do type inference. So you can't do multiple dispatch, e.g., have "print(x->foo(bar));" forwarded to the 'right' print function based on the type of its argument. (Actually, I've experimented with doing dynamic dispatch based on…

You’re Canadian? That’s pretty hilarious, I am too. It must be something they put in the Timbits.

For promotion, I’d recommend picking the most technically interesting part of your implementation, something that’s really clever, and then making a one page writeup for Paged Out magazine about it (https://pagedout.institute/). They regularly have interesting stuff to read, and they have a pretty decent amount of readers. You could write something longer and send it in to 2600 magazine too, they’d probably be interested even if it was an overview of the project.

Maybe the engine should be bigger first though so people are more enthused when they try it. I think 1 billion pages is around where a search engine starts to seem more normal: that’s about how much Marginalia has. How much space on disk does your index take up right now? Would you say the bottleneck is more the hard drive space or the crawling speed?

I too have been throwing messages in bottles into a silent sea for a pretty long time, but I think I'm okay with that. It doesn't help if you also have difficulty adhering to quintessential blog SEO best practices.

1. Consistent theme - A diverse set of interests and a lethal dose of ADD make this virtually impossible

2. Consistent updates - My articles tend to be rather unusual, and I'll often combine them with customized interactive layouts. Even a monthly post would be pretty ambitious for me.

On a slightly related note, I'm hoping that zines [1] see a resurgence in popularity as I could see it being a good point of entry towards possibly gaining readership for those whose sites are inadvertently running in stealth mode.

[1] - Such as Paged Out (https://pagedout.institute)

Paged Out! Institute https://pagedout.institute/

# What is Paged Out!?

Paged Out! is a free experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.

It's made by the community for the community. And it's not-for-profit (though in time, we hope it will be self-sustained) - this means that the issues will always be free to download, share, and print.

> Reminiscent of the vintage original Freaker/Hacker Publications, though clearly devoted to one page technical articles.

Paged Out! is a free, experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene and other similar topics.

It's made by the community for the community - the project was created by Gynvael Coldwind with multiple folks helping. And it's not-for-profit (though it is managed by a company – see the bottom of this page) - this means that the issues will always be free to download, share and print.

The last issue: https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_004_beta1.pdf

Sorry, that's one thing we probably cannot fix - the whole idea is that the laying out of the articles is done by authors (not us - the publisher) and the authors have (almost) full control over it.

This means that while we can recommend fonts, we can't really enforce them in this model.

I know the idea for the authors to do the layout is at least 'experimental' (that's the word I prefer to use), but it also gives one more space to be creative (and makes it easier for us from a certain perspective too). See also https://pagedout.institute/?page=faq.php#layout