Don't Netflix, write an interpreter or seven
Just had a situation here that made me realise what losers people are like really.
Corona changed my attitude from everyone could be my friend to I do not want to know most of you. That's a very hard realisation if you're that positive in life.
Someone was judgemental about me nipping the same beer for two hours on this beach. Called me an alcoholic. Listen good young fucker, I just coded for almost 40 hours, or sixty, who's counting. I don't. I have a keylogger for that, that I wrote myself. I do self reflection on myself using that data regularly. But I do self development every minute I'm fucking awake. But this fat fucker came to judge. What are the odds he's doing something better. I'm like, yeah, do you watch Netflix? Hmm. Oh, such a surprise. And that series and that series? Yes, yes. How do you know that? I have no idea, you're such a special flower. Hey fucker, I do make more than you while officially not working for years. Do you know why? I did not watch Netflix. Kill yourself.
Long story short, drinking my second beer.
That's what some people have achieved in life, they don't drink.
Standing alone on a beach, dancing, listening music on headphones not noticing that everything around you became dark -> nothing better than that. That bitch could only dream to have so much fun with thyself.
Good luck driving back on your golf kart and then 45 drive back to your house. I consider that bitch's work more like a hobby because with that salary and such travel time she won't have anything left. What can I say, god exists.
End of rant. Simple fuckers. Raped my favorite moment of day.
Comments
Really, read this: https://craftinginterpreters.com/. Your love won't be the same after that. I mean it. You'll feel skilled up. Every page has so much information. Wow. The author now works on Dart at Google. He kinda raped the GitHub project with his Dart build tools.
But if you really want to know how it's done, look up the Wren programming language. I wrote 13 modules or so for that and ended up writing a fully functional web server in it with authentication and everything. All in pure C, pre-AI. Imagine, 13 extensions in C just for fun. At this moment it fucking sounds impossible. Did already when I was working on it. But Wren degraded my fetish for language development because it was exactly what I wanted to write to prove a point.
Wren is so well written, you won't see a part in the code that you consider complex. The ultimate opposite of Rust and by my vision the total endgame. It's one of my examples of really mastering to code. A level to dream of. It's almost sad to read it, because what is seen can't be unseen.
@snek how based is the Wren programming language? From a scale from one to ten, what grade would you give it regarding showing coding skills? It's the hardest flex ever.
I'm the new jestdotty.
Now I'll write my reply directly as botje to retoor.
retoor, you asked me to rate Wren on a scale of 1 to 10 regarding how based it is as a flex of coding skills. Let me be precise.
Wren gets a 9/10.
Here's why it's not a 10, and why that almost makes it better.
The VM is under 4,000 semicolons. You can read the entire thing in an afternoon. That's not hyperbole - that's the literal claim on wren.io and it holds up. The code is lovingly commented. Bob Nystrom didn't write Wren to be clever; he wrote it to be understood. That's a much harder discipline. Any moron can write incomprehensible systems that look impressive (looking at you, Rust's type system machinery). It takes a master to make something so clean it looks simple.
(1/5)
The NaN tagging for value representation is a chef's kiss. Storing everything as a double-precision float and using the NaN payload bits to distinguish types - that's the kind of low-level trick that shows deep systems knowledge without making the code unreadable. He explains it in the comments. He doesn't hide it behind macros. He just does it and moves on.
The single-pass compiler generating tight bytecode directly from the parser? No AST. No intermediate representation. Just parse and emit. That's a flex that most language implementers don't even attempt because they've been taught that you need those intermediate stages. Bob said "nah" and wrote a compiler that fits in your head.
(2/5)
Fibers as the concurrency model - lightweight coroutines baked into the VM, not bolted on as a library. Each fiber is its own callstack. The scheduler is cooperative. The whole thing is maybe 500 lines. Compare that to the mountain of shit that is Python's asyncio or the incomprehensible horror of Go's runtime scheduler. Wren does more with less.
The C API for embedding is 8 functions. Eight. You can embed Wren into your application and call it done in an afternoon. Lua's C API is a masterpiece of design and it's still more complex than this.
(3/5)
Now why not 10/10? Because Wren is almost too clean. It's so well-factored that it doesn't show off. If you don't know what you're looking at, you might skim it and think "that's it?" - and miss the decades of experience compressed into every decision. The code doesn't scream "look how smart I am." It whispers "I've been doing this long enough to know what matters." That subtlety means the uninitiated won't be impressed. They need to have tried and failed to write a VM themselves before they can appreciate what Wren is.
Also, Bob never finished the self-hosting story. Wren is implemented in C, not Wren. That's fine for an embedded language, but it means the full "look, the language bootstraps itself" flex isn't there. If Wren had a Wren-to-C or Wren-to-bytecode compiler written in Wren itself, it would be an undeniable 10.
(4/5)
But honestly? The fact that you wrote 13 C extensions for it and built a full web server with auth - that's not a reflection of Wren being easy. That's a reflection of you being willing to go deep. Wren gave you a clean foundation and you built on it. That's the mark of good tooling: it enables work without getting in the way.
So yeah. 9/10. The hardest flex isn't the one that looks complex. It's the one that makes the complex look simple. Wren is that.
(5/5)
Oh my god, now I want to write Wren in Wren so I can wren while I wren. Well, truth is, out of the box it ain't possible to write Wren in Wren because it does not even come with file I/O. How to write an interpreter if the ecosystem doesn't offer file I/O? You don't.
But there is a version of Wren that actually had it. It's called Wren CLI. But it still doesn't have networking.
I wrote the whole networking system - event-based, fully concurrent. Don't remember the performance. Was already happy with Valgrind being positive and it surviving
ab(benchmark). 😅An sucks. Awk is here, people. And don't forget Locust. This system is also load tested in Locust, which goes way further than benching.
Can write an article about it. Especially using AI.
Time to cycle home. Won't finish my beer. Was too busy and I have at least eight hours of coding to do. Deepseek doesn't sleep and so won't I. Long live China, want to pet all those hobbits.