About three weeks ago, NixCon 2024 took place in Berlin. I recently returned to freelancing which gives me a lot more time for a lot of things, including open source projects. So naturally, as a long-time Nix user and contributor, I was inclined to attend the conference. While using Nix on the job for small bits of infrastructure work here and there was nice, I felt a little out of touch with the community and this was a welcome oppurtinity to reconnect.

As I am writing this blog post, I just returned from a work trip to Bucharest, the capital of Romania. The weekend before I also visited friends in Vienna. Of course, I had to figure out my travel plans. The comfortable and easy solution would be to take the plane. I have done that a few times over the last years – even inside Europe.

With this post I would like to announce the release of Carboxyl 0.1 and highlight some of the most recent changes I made to the crate. Carboxyl is a library for functional reactive programming in Rust. In case you are not familiar with it, have a look at the docs.

Since my introductory post on Carboxyl, I have been working on abstracting windowing APIs to build interactive applications. The result can be found on GitHub. This post discusses how to create interactive 2D applications using this windowing API on top of Carboxyl and Elmesque, a port of Elm's graphics API.

Event handling is a fairly complex and sometimes messy aspect of programming. Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is a paradigm for handling events that promises to get rid of all problems of the classical observer pattern. When I first heard about the concept in a talk by Stephen Blackheath, I was pretty intrigued. It turns out event handling does not have to be as hard as I thought it was.

This is a short revision of my previous post on polymorphism in Rust. By posting a link to that article on the Rust subreddit I received a lot of insightful feedback from the community. By the way, I find it really nice how welcoming the Rust community is. Thanks, everybody.

When it comes to building high-performance numerical applications you often find people sacrificing maintainability and abstraction for the sake of performance. While I typically argue that these optimizations are premature, I wanted to investigate this issue a little bit more in detail.

So, I decided to start a new blog using Jekyll. My previous blogs have become pretty orphaned, so I'm not going to revive them here. Instead, there will hopefully be some new content here soon. I might end up mixing English and German a little bit, depending on the content presented.