I came all the back from my Thanksgiving slumber just to say; really?

I love this library, and have made a C++ friendly version of the same.

What you get for a few hundred lines of code far outweighs any of the shortcomings it might have. It's a great starting point. If someone wants to make a full on format, they'll probably be better off just using the new JPEG XL, rather than trying to shape this thing.

It's a good exploration of what can be done with run-length encoding.

Just came here to say, good job. I was doing my own run-length encoding thing using the TGA format, but this is nicer. It's good enough that I am able to run a little screencast thing using it.

Not too long ago, _4 mbits_ was considered broadband in the USA. And it's one of the reasons we have such terrible infrastructure; we poured a ton of money to improve internet access, and now we're left with coaxial in 2021 being sufficient in even downtown areas, since there was no motive to install fiber instead.

And yet, without any analysis, anyone I've talked to was moved by the poem, and thought it was the best part of the inauguration. I think the moment, the black young girl standing at the pulpit of power, the collective relief, the joy of seeing a female (black/asian) as VP, culminated in an emotional uplifting, which the words did not capture at 100%. It had meaning in the context of 4 years of trump, of 400 years of oppression, of a summer of outcry for justice. Reading later will leave you flat I think. I thought it was perfect for the moment.

I can believe that too :-)

I use it as a way to rapidly prototype stuff related to new C-APIs https://github.com/wiladams

Currently using it to create a tiny Postscript interpreter: https://github.com/wiladams/lj2ps

I've worked for MS for 20 years. I sat in one of those Steve Ballmer meetings where he decried OpenSource. But, more soberingly at the time was that he said "we won't sell on Linux because we simply don't know now", in answer to the question "when will SQL Server be available on Linux"?

Times have changed. I mean look, we bought GitHub. That's not a move of someone that's trying to destroy from the inside. If it were, we would have immediately just slow rolled it, but we're actually making improvements.

I don't think we're collectively smart enough (nor are most orgs) to pull off grand conspiracies. Just a bunch of humans trying to do what's right for the company and customers.

So, I agree with your assessment. Lots of good, still bad actors, modern times have changed.

Yes, times change. Now MS is not the top dog anymore, Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are all eating his lunch. There is competition. So they can't get away with acting like the old MS. The marketing people figured that out, and are just adjusting. Business as usual.

I've never seen a deeply flawed self-enclosed cultured turned into a sane one. I've seen ones change because they were so much injected with outside influenced. I've seen ones change because the core was alright, and it recognized the problem. But never have I seen a team of bullies sticking together and turn into good people.

However, I have seen plenty of them putting up a smile, getting some green paint on and buying a stairway to heaven.

It's a shame people keep falling for it though. That's why politicians can be crooked. That's why abusive relationships last. That's why you can pollute, use children workers and lie to customers: by the time you pay the price, it's a slap on the wrist compared to what you did, and earned from it.

Then you just say you changed, and people forget or forgive, let you keep the loot, and the right to carry on with your business.

> Now MS is not the top dog anymore, Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are all eating his lunch.

MS is one of the most valuable companies in the world, and regularly surpasses Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook as the most valuable company in the world.

> I've never seen a deeply flawed self-enclosed cultured turned into a sane one.

I doubt that your definition of sanity is at all useful here. You're obviously not familiar with the core teams that comprise MS and you're not disseminating any information here that is even remotely useful.

I guess you're safe in the bubble here though where people think Windows is simply unusable because some of the control panel windows have a different dressing than other ones and that macOS is the best despite that it's missing the most basic window management features! Hah!!

I doubt HN crowd at large cares about control panel settings that much. What's importan though is that for many years MS led a very violent campaign against their competition, including Linux and Open Source. It wasn't a one-time thing. It was year after year, with a strategy and tactics, some of it leaked in the Halloween Documents. These clearly showed that Microsoft is an equivalent of self-absorbed bully who doesn't really care about the benefit of their customers but just net profit. It's really hard to forget. So I'm sorry if some of us don't believe Nadella's smile.

I don't need to disseminate any information, microsoft lying, insulting, cheating and corrupting for 20 years has been largely documented by the medias in the nineties.

If you were capable of reading at all at that time, it was one scandal every year.

> I mean look, we bought GitHub. That's not a move of someone that's trying to destroy from the inside.

lol

ok, so it is exactly the move of someone trying to kill it all from the inside...

But really, it's something easily judged over time. Everyone will be able to judge how our open source attitude is in coming years.

And hay, look, there's more absorption of Linux into Windows... Is that embrace extend, or recognize reality? Or hold on for dear life? From my perspective, it's evolution, and nothing but good.

I don't know, personally I remain faithful to the classics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeo_Danaos_et_dona_ferentes

and cautious about these kind of corporate mentality changes, it seems to have been proved a valid approach for the last 2 thousand years or so.

Once you as a company have a certain track record, I'd say it's not unreasonable for an outsider to shift from "just wait and see if it'll be terrible!" to a more proactive stance. In cases like this, past actions do model future behaviour.

There was quite a lot of openscad replacement going on in 2011. I even made a lua based alternative.

Ive worked for Kevin during his tenure at MS. Ads have not been the focus, so I'm not sure the innuendo means much.

I work for Microsoft, and the back of my employee badge says: Our Mission; Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

To me, this implies that our engineering organizations, and entire company, need to have an appropriate amount of empathy across a broad spectrum of geographies, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and the like. You only get that by having a diversity of talent, and more importantly, inclusion in your engineering practices.

When I talk about diversity, I usually say; "There are two forms of diversity, DNA diversity, the stuff we usually talk about in terms of color, sex, etc, things you can see, and then there's diversity of perspectives and experiences. You need the diversity of experiences and perspectives. In some cases that's conveniently wrapped in some forms of DNA diversity, but is not exclusive to that".

I don't think the question is at all controversial, and we should not be afraid to openly talk about it.

So what would be the benefits in DNA diversity at all? If you can get a diverse views of perspectives, why bring in the DNA diversity which is going to lead to conflicts as people won't be able to talk as effectively as people who are more homogeneous?

> So what would be the benefits in DNA diversity at all?

Well, this is a pretty contrived example, but IIRC a major company (HP?) made facial-recognition software that couldn't handle people with dark skin.

If there had been people like that on the dev or testing team, perhaps it would have been noticed earlier.

That story is apocryphal. The software in question simply struggled with low contrast images like a dark face in a dark room, which isn't due to racism or employees forgetting that black people exist: it's an inherently hard image recognition problem.

Are you seriously arguing companies should be entirely white and male because then there won't be sexism and racism problems?!

And are you aware that non-DNA differences also create divisions?

> would be the benefits in DNA diversity at all

I would argue there's often correlation between these types of diversity

I think it's more interesting than that. This is a mixture of C and Lua code!

Looking at it, I can imagine redoing it as LuaJIT and using ljsyscall to deal with the system calls on all platforms. Might be even more snappy.

All the heavier processing is done in C already. Lua is only used for handling dis-/reconnects, rekeying and the likes. Hence I don't think LuaJIT would improve the performance much in this particular case.

> ... redoing it as LuaJIT...

is luajit supported on versions beyond 5.1 ? just wondering...

This is a strangely worded question. LuaJIT is compatible with PUC Lua 5.1. It will thus not run (without problems/tweaking) run code that is designed for Lua >= 5.2. However, the differences are not really big in practice. It is rather more likely that the new options (especially the FFI) that come with LuaJIT will lead to the most work when switching over. Not that they would be absolutely needed, but it just makes it all so much smoother and faster - which is probably the reason to switch to LuaJIT in the first place.

what a strangely worded response :)

all i can get from your response is a 'yes' to my earlier affirmation that luajit is compatible with Lua 5.1 honestly, responding to gp's comment, i also found lua's embedding in this application quite interesting.

imho, for something which might be living for a long time, considering using lua-jit might not be a good idea.