Developer Voices

Back in 2012, José Valim started building Elixir to as a way to have his ideal programming language running on the same platform as Erlang. Fast-forward 12 years and it’s become build anything from distributed infrastructure to notebooks and websites.

In this week’s Developer Voices, José joins us to tell the history of Elixir in a series of design choices. Which features mattered to him in the early days, and which ones excite him most now. What’s going on under the hood to make Elixir tick, and what does its future hold?

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Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoices

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Elixir Homepage: https://elixir-lang.org/

Elixir Docs: https://elixir-lang.org/docs.html

Numerical Elixir: https://github.com/elixir-nx

Phoenix: https://phoenixframework.org/

Livebook: https://livebook.dev/

José’s Livebook & Elixir Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pas9WdWIBHs

Comparing Elixir & Erlang Variables: https://dashbit.co/blog/comparing-elixir-and-erlang-variables

Gleam on the BEAM: https://youtu.be/RntfkL8lUY4

José on Github: https://github.com/josevalim

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins

There’s huge pressure on Python at the moment to get faster, ideally without changing at all. One increasingly–popular way of achieving that impossible task is to push the performance critical code down into C, C++, or Rust. And this week we’re focussing on the Python route, as we take a look at PyO3.

David Hewitt’s the principal committer to PyO3, and he joins us to go through the easy parts, the hard parts, and the works in progress, giving us an insight into how Python and Rust work under the hood, and quite how much work it takes to make them work as one.

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PyO3 User Guide: https://pyo3.rs/v0.22.0/

PyO3 on Github: https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3

Polars: https://pola.rs/

Tokio: https://tokio.rs/

Trio: https://trio.readthedocs.io/

Robyn: https://github.com/sparckles/Robyn

Faster CPython: https://github.com/faster-cpython

Maturin: https://www.maturin.rs/

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David on Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@davidhewitt

David on Twitter: https://x.com/davidhewittdev

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Kris on Twitter: https://x.com/krisajenkins

Most message systems have an opinion on the right way to do inter-systems communication. Whether it’s actors, queues, message logs or just plain ol’ request response, nearly every tool has decided on The Right Way to do messaging, and it optimises heavily for that specific approach. But NATS is absolutely running against that trend.

In this week’s episode, Jeremey Saenz joins us to talk about NATS, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s configurable message-passing and data-transfer system. The promise is a tool that can happily behave like a queue for one channel, a log like another and a request/response protocol for the third, all with a few client flags.

But how does that work? What’s it doing under the hood, what features does it offer, and what do we lose in return for that flexibility? Jeremy has all the answers as we ask, what is NATS really?

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NATS on Github: https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server

NATS Homepage: https://nats.io/

Getting Started with NATS: https://youtu.be/hjXIUPZ7ArM

Developer Voices Episode on Benthos: https://youtu.be/labzg-YfYKw

CNCF: https://www.cncf.io/

The Ballerina Language: https://ballerina.io/

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins

Support Developer Voices via Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoices

Support Developer Voices via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@developervoices/join

Smalltalk is one of those programming languages that’s lived out of the mainstream, but often referenced as an influence and an important part of programming history. It’s the cornerstone of object-oriented programming, it was into message passing before actors were cool, and it blurs the line between operating system, programming language and personal notebook. But what is it?
Joining us to discuss it is Juan Vuletich, the creator of one of Smalltalk’s latest incarnations, Cuis. In this episode we cover Smalltalk’s history, its design ideas, Cuis’s unique implementation and what makes this modern implementation something special.

Smalltalk is over 50 years old, but its vision of how computing could work has only begun. Let’s see if we can mine some ideas from it to take us into the next generation of computing...
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The Cuis Smalltalk Book: https://cuis-Smalltalk.github.io/TheCuisBook/Preface.html

Cuis on Github: https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev

The Cuis Community: https://cuis.st/community

A Short History of Cuis: https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev/blob/master/Documentation/CuisHistory.md

Monticello VCS: https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1287

Juan’s Music Research: https://www.jvuletich.org/research.html

Back to the Future - The Story of Squeak (pdf): https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/263700.263754

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins

Given how many languages have been written in C over the years, it’s not surprising to see new languages being written in Rust. What is surprising about this week’s guest is the domain he’s writing for: Computer Aided Design (CAD). Could Rust be sneaking its way into the CAD world too?

Joining me to discuss the design and implementation of a CAD programming language is Adam Chalmers. He works at Zoo, developing KCL - a language that looks like JavaScript, runs on Rust, and offers users a seamless hybrid experience of both coding and point-and-click modelling. So, how does that all fit together?

In this episode we look at the design and implementation of a programming language in Rust; how KittyCAD creates that hybrid environment for text-based programming and point-and-click modelling; and how we can learn to write our own Rust-interpreted languages.

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Adam’s Blog: https://adamchalmers.com/

Adam’s Guide To Writing Parsers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF3kMyzMC40

Zoo’s Modelling App: https://zoo.dev/modeling-app

Mechanical CAD: https://zoo.dev/blog/mechanical-cad-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow

A Lego brick in KCL: https://zoo.dev/docs/kcl-samples/lego

Winnow: https://docs.rs/winnow/latest/winnow/

Nom: https://docs.rs/nom/latest/nom/

Factorio: https://www.factorio.com/

Satisfactory: https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/

Crafting Interpreters: https://craftinginterpreters.com/

Coding in Antarctica: https://brr.fyi/

Support Developer Voices on Patreon: https://patreon.com/DeveloperVoices

Support Developer Voices on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@developervoices/join

Adam on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins