Simon Willison’s Weblog

Things I’ve Learned Serving on the Board of The Perl Foundation (via) My post about the PSF board inspired Perl Foundation secretary Makoto Nozaki to publish similar notes about how TPF (also known since 2019 as TPRF, for The Perl and Raku Foundation) operates.

Seeing this level of explanation about other open source foundations is fascinating. I’d love to see more of these.

Along those lines, I found the 2024 Financial Report from the Zig foundation really interesting too.

# 24th September 2024, 1:42 am / open-source, zig, perl, psf

Cyber (via) “Cyber is a new language for fast, efficient, and concurrent scripting.” Lots of interesting ideas in here, but the one that really caught my eye is that its designed to be easily embedded into other languages and “will allow the host to insert gas mileage checks in user scripts. This allows the host to control how long a script can run”—my dream feature for implementing a safe, sandboxed extension mechanism! Cyber is implemented using Zig and LLVM.

# 28th January 2023, 4:25 am / sandboxing, zig, programming-languages, llvm

Bun. “Bun is a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime”—this is very interesting. It’s the first project I’ve seen written using the Zig language, which I see as somewhat equivalent to Rust. Bun provides a full Node.js-style JavaScript environment plus a host of packaged tools—an npm install client, a TypeScript transpiler, bundling tools—all wrapped up in a single binary. The JavaScript engine itself extends JavaScriptCore. Bun also ships with its own wrapper for SQLite.

# 6th July 2022, 5:24 pm / npm, typescript, sqlite, javascript, zig