#and the software i use don't merge gifs so...... yeah

[stardustinthesky]

John and Delenn + kissing

[searemind]

I got into computers at a young age.. and often tried to play games on the family computer (using questionable means 🙄) and failed mostly because of old hardware. Looking back, I still don't have access to any "powerful" computers as such. However, this made me try to do more with whatever means i had.

I got my first "nerdy" thing a few years ago in the form of a Raspberry Pi 3B+ as a present and it was just perfect. I've since moved on to a Raspberry Pi 400, using almost the same stuff I used on the previous model, but faster. This led me to programming and everything related to it. I read and watched various courses and textbooks on a lot of different stuff (never really learning much). It's true when they say that you don't learn without doing the thing you're trying to learn.

So i started doing stuff. I wrote small programs in Python and later C. I made a simple cipher tool for my school project last year, and a .vcf file parser this year. Researching about new things (at least new to me) made me learn not only about programming, but how things worked in general. I started trying to use my phone to do this stuff. Android as a platform is pretty easy to use for these purposes from what I've experienced. I found an app called Termux which is honestly perfect for this.

I started compiling software on my phone - software which probably wasn't supposed to be compiled for Android in the first place. I started porting bits and pieces of softwares which didn't work as it is on Android. I tried cross-compiling and found one of the best things about open source projects - there are so many of them and finding an obscure project which exactly caters to your needs is satisfying indeed.

I tried packaging these softwares I compiled in a form which could be distributed easily. So I modified jackpal's Terminal Emulator for Android and added these binaries in the folder which is supposed to contain native libraries. I came across the differences between static linking and dynamic linking in this process and how Android used to use static linking in the beginning and now Google itself discourages it.

So I statically linked a lot of stuff and compiled a LOT of stuff - C Compilers (trust me, building LLVM from source on an ARM android phone isn't fast at all), Interpreters for a whole list of languages, tools and editors, and a lot of other stuff. The thrill of compiling from source is just indescribable. It adds a sense of belonging and pride. And when that something contains your own inputs and modifications and added features, it feels even better.

The latest thing I've made is an app which started as something I'd use to learn Haskell (I have not yet 😔). I kept on adding things to it and now I statically compiled an X Server with a whole bunch of GUI apps which run (almost) flawlessly on my phone. I still can't justify it with any purpose and I probably will move onto something else, something better soon. I call the app XHaskell (I know, predictable).

With each project I start, I learn something new and in my opinion, gain more maturity in this field. From what I've experienced, there is always someone who knows much more than you when it comes to computing in general. So that keeps me from trying to act like I know a lot in front of everybody I guess.

Honestly, this is something that can always take my mind away from almost anything else I'm thinking about. It has helped me out of depressive and suicidal states and I'm thankful about it (not that all of that's behind me for good). But yeah... idk what I just typed and why I typed it.. but this is my first blog post I guess..

Here's nyancat in XHaskell (I haven't found any screen recorder written in pure Xlib yet; almost all of them use GTK which I can't statically link yet.. so yeah.. I took 30 screenshots one after the other and merged them into a gif using imagemagick which i statically compiled with musl a long while ago using my Raspberry Pi)