Daniel Duan's Articles

I've discovered a new hobby.

Recently, I gave my TOML library written in Swift an 800% speed boost.

I just released version 0.4.1 of TOMLDecoder, a TOML 1.0 parser, and decoder implemented in pure Swift.

I bought a 3D printer, and, as a result, got into 3D modeling recently.

Introduction In GRPC, one could define an RPC that, in addition to the normal request-response messages, it also defines a custom message to represent errors: message SignUpWithEmailRequest { string email = 1; string password = 2; string referral_co…

For curiosity's sake, I decided I want to play with MLIR's C API with Swift.

I tried out GitHub Copilot this weekend.

Alice: Hey, did you know that COVID virus was leaked from a lab?

As of this writing, I'm deeply skeptical of LLM replacing our needs for skilled programmers.

As of today, my identity in the "fediverse" has become @daniel@duan.ca.

From a purely personal perspective, connecting with people via the internet is good.

For whatever reason, a dialogue from the Matrix trilogy stuck with me.

Science discussion in the mainstream always focus on the reductive "pro" vs "anti" dynamic.

Growing up in China, I remember using google.cn daily.

How do you use use Instruments, the instrumentation tool distributed alongside Xcode?

The ideal outcome of using Nix or home-manager is to have as many things as possible under their control.

So, you use a standalone home-manager, it's set up with flake, tracking a particular nixpkgs channel.

In the journey of growing software systems, there comes a point where certain engineering decision will create a chasm so large that it's practically impossible to go back.

The problem As of writing of this article, when you attempt to use Apple's Swift library IndexStoreDB on Linux as a normal SwiftPM dependency, it won't build successfully: ❯ cat Package.resolved { "object": { "pins": [ { "package": "In…

During the holidays, I spent some time on the parser that underlies TOMLDecoder.

Note: as of Feburary, 2022, the steps written below has been incorporated by the official Nix install script for macOS.

I've never been patient enough to learn the JIRA plain-text syntax, depite being a frequent user throughout the years.

Swift has a pretty decent C-interoperability story.

One of the goals in the re-write of my VFS library Pathos is to make it go fast.

I noticed a lot of people are playing these two games on Twitch recently: Fall Guys and Among Us.

Having used macOS for a number of years, I've formed some habit that I'm never going to shake.

After turning off stream on Twitch, the first thing I normally do is exporting the stream video to YouTube, so that the stream has an archive that survives Twitch's short-ish retain policy.

Recently, I got a PC.

tl;dr: To work on Rust project with nix-shell, rls and extensions such as rust-analysis, rust-src, without caring too much about specific Rust toolchain version (except for it being stable), use the following shell.nix: let moz_overlay = import (builtin…

I took back my website.

It's been bothering me for years.

In a purly reactive world, your entire program merge into a single stream.

I enjoyed making TOMLDeserializer and TOMLDecoder recently.

As someone who lives in a terminal simulator, I'm pleasantly surprised by the new toys we get in recent years such as fzf, ripgrep, fd, etc.

I want to talk about this little function: func interact(_ process: (String) -> String) { var input = "" while let line = readLine() { input += line } print(process(input)) } Brief explanation: it reads all the input from stdin as

Recently, I discovered a curious thing about Dates in two large projects I work on.

While implementing some file I/O APIs in Pathos, I decided reading/writing file content as Foundation.Data is kind of important (can you blame me?).

Wrap file permissions from stat and chmod in an OptionSet in Swift.

From the AST and scopes, come a simple interpreter.

A short video on the concept of static scope.

Sorry for the click-baity title.

This video demonstrates a few things: the readLine standard library function, scripting with Swift, and pattern matching as loop conditions.

Planning, recording and editing a video is something I find very enjoyable to do.

Every now and then, I check on the progress of Web Assembly.

I guess I'm starting a series of minute-long videos.

I discover, report, fix and merge a bug in the open-source Foundation project.

Introduction The Basics Compatibility with older iOS versions How to screenshot with inverted color settings Conclusion Introduction Apple sneakily shipped a "dark mode" in iOS 11, native apps looks gorgeous in this mode (especially on iPhone X with it's…

Alas, there's the 3rd and last video about BitArray, originated on my spark of inspiration on a Caltrain ride home.

This video shows what it takes to open source a Swift project.

In this video, I build a space-efficient BitArray that confirms to RandomAccessCollection in Swift in a playground.