My current plans

Current plans:

• Work on rsyscall. Major rsyscall features:
  • Upgrade to and require pidfds, to get rid of the complexity and bugs of signal handling.
  • Pipeline memory reads/writes in rsyscall, which will both improve UX (by letting us make memory writing implicit instead of explicit) and performance.
  • Make some demos (mostly this will happen as part of Unix game)
• Make a C library which interposes getenv/setenv to make environment variables thread-local, as a first step to integrating environment variables into languages as full-fledged dynamically scoped variables, supporting language-level "re-bind in scope". (instead of requiring a new process as they currently do).
• Make a game as a Python library. Not a programming game (where the fun part is implementing algorithms), but a regular game (where the fun part is the game itself), just with the Python language as the user interface. WIPs: here, here

  The point is to demonstrate that the special-purpose UIs found in many applications (such as video games), which typically suck, can be replaced with a programming system. That is, a system made up of a programming language, REPL, IDE, together forming an entire environment, which provides a much richer and more powerful set of features for interacting with computers. (Including games, which I think will be much more approachable as an example.) This also has implications for abstraction-reuse.

• Like the Python game, but with Python replaced with "advanced" capability-secure Unix programming. Things like fd passing, and so on; everything that I think is important and required for making a capability system on Unix. Hopefully this will provide:
  • Effectively, a tutorial for capability-secure Unix programming
  • An implementable list of my requirements for capability-oriented Unix programming
  • A large system built according to my ideas about capability-oriented Unix programming (this will be a useful concrete example)
  I originally wanted to make something useful rather than a game, but now I think trying to be useful is a distraction.
• Do a project in Agda. (maybe for SIGBOVIK?)
• Do a talk (on anything) at an industry conference. Just to see if it's useful.

Evergreen plans:

• Read things on my reading list.
• Write things on my writing list.