This Week I Learned: 2023W02

Alternative Protocols to HTTP

I discovered this week the existence of Gopher, a protocol that was created in 1991 for the same purpose as HTTP, but with a different approach (Firefox has had supported it until version 4.0).

Another, more recent protocol, Gemini, was created in 2019 and was inspired by Gopher.

Max Integer

Javascript has a constant called MAX_SAFE_INTEGER, representing the max safe value of an integer (equivalent to 2^53 - 1).

If you go above you will encounter some weird behaviors:

const max = Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER;
console.log(max); // 9007199254740991
console.log(max + 1); // 9007199254740992
console.log(max + 2); // 9007199254740992
console.log(max + 3); // 9007199254740994

PHP has one too:

$max = PHP_INT_MAX;
echo $max; // 9223372036854775807
var_dump($max + 1 === $max + 2); // true

Same for Python:

import sys

print(sys.maxsize) # 9223372036854775807

Edge Runtime

Vercel has launched the Edge runtime, which is a runtime able to run javascript, typescript or web assembly, in CDN nodes. It is based on V8, like Node, but it’s different from Node. You can use node_modules as long as it does not use node specific APIs like fs.

I’m bad with JS, so it still seems quite complicated to me, but it looks quite fascinating. (Thanks Olivier)

Neovim - Colorschemes

I have a lot of neovim colorschemes I love, and I change them regularly. I wished I had a different one each time at startup.

This was actually quite easy to achieve with lua:

local colors = {
    'adwaita',
    'afterglow',
    'ayu',
    -- all the colorschemes you like...
}

-- #colors is the length of the colors array
-- since lua arrays are 1-indexed, we don't need to add 1

-- math.random returns a random number between
-- 1 included and #colors included
local color = colors[math.random(#colors)]

-- .. concatenates strings
vim.cmd("colorscheme " .. color)