en.SH.PP.RU news


Nokotan release!

Sat Aug 1 17:25:12 2026 UTC

UPD: 1.01 released. Symlinks to directories are treated as directories now. Also, '/' is appended to directories in directory listings.

Nokotan ver. 1.0 released. The program is now finished and only bug-fix updates will be published.

The most notable change is that I added text MIME-types database instead of hard-coded types. You just write a file (/etc/nokotan-types), and Nokotan binds types to files using information from this file.

I also added index.gmi support, since it can be useful.

And one more thing: -F enables a small footer in directory listings, which says: ``Generated and served by Nokotan''. Use it if you really want to support me.

See ya!


Nokotan 0.4

Sun Jul 19 16:08:47 2026 UTC

Nokotan ver. 0.4 released.

  • -u and -g now accept user and group names instead of numeric IDs. This is done by reading /etc/passwd and /etc/group manually.
  • The program daemonizes by default, now you need to supply -f to run it in foreground.
  • It doesn't try to chroot now. Pass -c to chroot to the base directory
  • -d specifies a directory to serve, instead of -r. -V enables virtual hosts, instead of -a. Sorry for breaking backward compatibility :-D
  • The logging is quiet by default. -v and -vv increase verbosity.
  • New -e and -E flags to write log massages to error output.
  • Files' types are still hardcoded, but I added audio/mpeg for mp3 and video/mp4 for mp4. I still think about how to make this part better.
  • The most notable feature is that Nokotan generates sorted directory listings now. Thanks to dronix33 who told me about scandir(3).

The sorting is case-insensitive, and directories are put before other files.

I was afraid that Nokotan would crash when loading all entries of large directories into memory. But I created with a script a directory with 65536 files and requested it 16 times simultaneously. CPU usage was 100% but it took only about 30 megabytes of RAM. This is much less than I thought.

Enjoy!

http://en.sh.pp.ru/nokotan-dl.html


More docs

Sat May 16 21:53:16 2026 UTC

I finally created some documentation, so other people can understand examples and even write their own programs in Refal!

The language manual

The list of builtin functions

These texts will be shipped with the next version of Alya.

I hope it will be useful.

And, as always, sorry for bad English


Beta 1.11 minor bugfix release

Mon May 11 11:16:21 2026 UTC

New Alya Beta 1.11 features three bugfixes:

  • Added compiler flags -ansi -pedantic. Thanks left and Vbit for report. My compiler isn't such finicky.
  • Fixed all memory leaks (even harmless). Admire the valgrind output!
  • Fixed error message on program file opening

Thanks again to dronix <http://apm.unixwizards.net> who tested the interpreter on OpenBSD.


Beta 1.1 Bugfix release

Fri May 8 19:47:57 2026 UTC

New Alya Beta 1.1 features some bugfixes:

  • Added `make install' target
  • Some example scripts were revised
  • Fixed paths to the interpreter in example scripts
  • Fixed segfault on empty initial view field (for example, when typing empty line in interacrive mode)

Thanks to dronix <http://apm.unixwizards.net> who sent me useful feedback and improved the Makefile.


Alya Beta!

Wed May 6 20:30:06 2026 UTC

I finally made interpreter behavior with lexical, syntactical and execution errors adequate, so it became more suitable for the public. So I decided to release it as a first beta version.

The new version features various Refal-program errors, such as:

  • Imbalanced quotes, brackets and parentheses
  • Execution errors: unknown function, no matching pattern
  • And much more!

Explore!


Compound symbol update!

Sat Apr 25 17:42:34 2026 UTC

New version of Alya is released.

There is no more limitation on length of compound symbols, but more significant is that identifiers can contain much more characters, such as +, ~ and much more.

It only cannot start with '=' and contain any of this: #;{}()<>'

Download page.


Alya v. Alpha 0.1 published

Mon Apr 20 17:39:04 2026 UTC

I published the first version of my largest program (about 1500 lines of code). It can be found here:

http://en.sh.pp.ru/alya.html

It is my first published program, so there might be troubles.

There's still much work to do, but it already works (from some point of view).

Enjoy!


The site was set up

Tue Mar 31 22:09:37 2026 UTC

This is my, well, third attempt to create a site. I hope this time it will be useful.

I didn't finished the setting yet (just look at this cool woodpecker in the upper-left corner), but it's 1:12 am and I want to sleep, so I'll do it tomorrow.

I will publish my recent project here in the next few days.


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