Modernizing hlang with the nguh compiler

Sat Dec 31 2022

Want to watch this in your video player of choice? Take this:
https://cdn.xeiaso.net/file/christine-static/talks/vod/2022/12-31-nguh/index.m3u8

This stream was the last stream of 2022 and focused on modernizing the hlang compiler. In this stream I reverse-engineered how WebAssembly modules work and wrote my own compiler for a trivial esoteric programming language named h. The existing compiler relied on legacy features of WebAssembly tools that don't work anymore.

This stream covers the following topics:

  • Reverse-engineering the WebAssembly module format based on the specification and other reverse-engineering tools
  • Adapting an existing compiler to output WebAssembly directly
  • Deploying a new service to my NixOS machines in the cloud
  • Building a Nix flake and custom NixOS module to build and deploy the new hlang website
  • Terraform DNS config
  • Writing the writeup on the new compiler

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

Tags: hlang, go, wasm, philosophy, devops, terraform, aws, route53, nixos