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| − | This page lists the devroom proposal for the "Minimalistic Languages - for big ideas" devroom.
| + | See [[FOSDEM2019-devroom-minimalism]] |
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| − | = Devroom name: =
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| − | Minimalistic Languages - for big ideas
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| − | = Devroom description: =
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| − | In computing the term
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| − | [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism_(computing)] [Minimalism]]
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| − | refers to the application of minimalist philosophies and principles in
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| − | the design and use of hardware and software. Minimalism, in this
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| − | sense, means designing systems that use the least hardware and
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| − | software resources possible. In an era where personal computer
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| − | perfomance capabilities expanded by orders of magnitude and mainstream
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| − | software becomes more and more complex, minimalistic programming
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| − | languages try to remain simple, elegant and use are little resources
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| − | as possible.
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| − | With the expansion of small hardware in phones, the internet of things
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| − | and embedded systems, free and open source software minimalism is key
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| − | to low energy use and secure systems.
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| − | Key organizers of this minimalistic languages dev room for big ideas
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| − | are Mes, GNU Guile and Lua. Other programming languages such as
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| − | Smalltalk, Tcl and Rebol will be asked to contribute talks. We expect
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| − | a broad interest in this room with very diverse talks.
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| − | We are very excited about GNU Mes, for example, because it allows from
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| − | source builds of Linux and Hurd distributions from a 200 byte
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| − | bootstrap binary. It consists of a mutual self-hosting Scheme
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| − | interpreter written in ~5,000 LOC of simple C and a Nyacc-based C
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| − | compiler written in Scheme. This mes.c is being simplified to be
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| − | transpiled by M2-Planet.
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| − | GNU Guile is the preferred extension system for the GNU Project which
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| − | features an implementation of the Scheme programming language, a
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| − | dialect of Lisp with a mature community. GNU Guile is continually
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| − | improved where recent milestones were a new compiler infrastructure, a
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| − | virtual machine implementation, a switch to the Boehm-Demers-Weiser
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| − | garbage collector and many improvements to the Guile Scheme language
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| − | itself. Major performance improvements were demonstrated at FOSDEM
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| − | with a new optimizing compiler which is now part of the recent 2.2
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| − | release. Other recent additions are a "sandbox" facility that can run
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| − | code from untrusted users and improved support for immutable data.
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| − | Big Guile ideas are GNU Shepherd which is a systemd replacement and
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| − | the GNU Guix project with over 300K lines of Scheme code to build
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| − | complete Linux and Hurd reproducible software distributions.
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| − | Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting
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| − | language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented
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| − | programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data
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| − | description. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data
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| − | description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible
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| − | semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode
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| − | with a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory
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| − | management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for
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| − | configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping. LuaJIT is an
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| − | alternative implementation of Lua, achieving performance widely
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| − | considered to be one of the fastest dynamic language implementations.
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| − | Some big Lua ideas can be found in the gaming community, networking,
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| − | and in embedded systems.
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| − | Examples of the types of talks we envisage for this dev room are
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| − | - Mes bootstrapping full free software systems from source
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| − | - Tiny web servers for embedded systems
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| − | - Mobile/embedded software development with Lua
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| − | - Distributed applications using Flow-Based Programming on Racket Scheme
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| − | - Who Needs JSON when you can DSL?
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| − | - A Picture Language for Guile
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| − | - Hacking free software with GNU Guix
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| − | - Building domain specific languages with Tcl, Lua and Guile
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| − | - Alternative Lua implementations
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| − | - Languages that run on the Lua VM: MoonScript, Fennel, Urn
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| − | - Statically-typed languages based on Lua: Titan, Pallene
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| − | - Game development frameworks and libraries: Defold, Love2D, etc.
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| − | - Package management for minimalistic languages
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| − | - Lua as an in-kernel scripting language
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| − | = Related URLs =
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| − | - MES and bootstrappable https://www.gnu.org/software/mes and
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| − | http://bootstrappable.org
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| − | - Lua https://www.lua.org/
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| − | - GNU Guile https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/
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| − | - GNU Guile libs https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/libraries/
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| − | - Scheme http://community.schemewiki.org/
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| − | - Racket https://racket-lang.org/
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| − | - Smalltalk http://smalltalk.org/
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| − | - Tcl https://www.tcl.tk/about/language.html
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| − | - Rebol http://www.rebol.org/
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| − | = Why should FOSDEM accept this proposal? =
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| − | Minimalism matters. Minimalism allows for smaller systems that take
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| − | less resources and consume less energy. More importantly, free and
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| − | open source minimalism allows for secure systems that are easy to
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| − | understand. Finally, we believe that minimalism is educational and
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| − | brings back the fun of the early days of computing where people learn
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| − | to understand systems from the ground up. Speakers will be asked to
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| − | accentuate the educational side of their projects.
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| − | Lua and GNU Guile are projects with a growing number of users and
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| − | active development. In 2016 and 2017 GNU Guile and Lua shared a
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| − | devroom at FOSDEM in the K building and both were a great success with
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| − | a continuous full house. FOSDEM also gives these communities a great
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| − | impulse by getting developers together and projects like MES started
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| − | there. This devroom will be a great oportunity to attract new people,
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| − | new ideas from different backgrounds, as well as gather everyone
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| − | familiar with the projects together, to develop new free Software and
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| − | improve existing projects.
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| − | = Devroom organisers =
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| − | - Ludovic Courtès (ludo@gnu.org) - GNU Guile project leader
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| − | - Hisham Muhammad - LuaRocks lead developer (hisham@gobolinux.org)
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| − | - Ricardo Wurmus (ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de)
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| − | - Jan Nieuwenhuizen (janneke@gnu.org)
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| − | - Pjotr Prins (pjotr.public445@thebird.nl)
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| − | - Alex Sassmannshausen (alex.sassmannshausen@gmail.com)
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| − | - Amirouche Boubekki (amirouche.boubekki@gmail.com)
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| − | - Manolis Ragkousis (manolis837@gmail.com)
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| − | See also http://community.schemewiki.org/?FOSDEM2019 and http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaAtFosdem
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