Plurrrr

Thu 20 Apr 2023

Why Perl?

I sometimes get asked why I use Perl so much. Am I not a fan of strongly typed functional programming? Yeah, I am. Ask me to write something that is known, for sure, to become a big system and I’ll pick strongly typed functional programming without hesitation. But most of the software I write is not for sure going to become a big system. Here’s what Perl does well:

  1. It is installed by default everywhere. I don’t need administrative privileges to deploy Perl code almost anywhere. That is extremely empowering.
  2. With a great amount of discipline, Perl scripts can be successfully scaled up into large, complex systems.
  3. I can be confident that a Perl script I write today will run unaltered 10 years from now, modulo external collaborators.
  4. Perl can be used nearly as a shell replacement for very quick scripting.
  5. Perl has a small set of core syntax and is very extensible and flexible in adopting new paradigms.

Source: Why Perl?, an article by Christoffer Stjernlöf.

The Nix, OpenGL and Ubuntu Integration Nightmare

In this article, we’re about to dive into the uncharted OpenGL on Linux waters. After briefly explaining how the OpenGL calls are routed from your application to the GPU, we’ll look at the NixOS special case. We’ll then explore how we can run the OpenGL programs built by Nix on a foreign distribution, such as Ubuntu or Fedora. Finally, we’ll introduce NixGLHost a new approach to solve this problem.

Source: The Nix, OpenGL and Ubuntu Integration Nightmare, an article by Ninja Trappeur.