@dropbear.dev
Curious to see your top plays now... what's good from the late 50's thats got you hooked?
December 5, 2025 at 7:37 PM
Curious to see your top plays now... what's good from the late 50's thats got you hooked?
Until somewhat recently (maybe a couple of years now) this is how all of Google's JavaScript was written, they had their own compiler that was far more advanced than TypeScript, I always found that interesting. I'm also a fan of buildless approaches, I think Jared is onto something here personally.
December 5, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Until somewhat recently (maybe a couple of years now) this is how all of Google's JavaScript was written, they had their own compiler that was far more advanced than TypeScript, I always found that interesting. I'm also a fan of buildless approaches, I think Jared is onto something here personally.
All in all, it took about 2 days but I ended up with something very cool I think. Not only did I get that simple and clean interface I was looking for but I got a lot of additional advanced functionality as well. Full test suite, great docs, idomatic Dart, never hard to learn about C. I'm impressed.
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
All in all, it took about 2 days but I ended up with something very cool I think. Not only did I get that simple and clean interface I was looking for but I got a lot of additional advanced functionality as well. Full test suite, great docs, idomatic Dart, never hard to learn about C. I'm impressed.
I started from a position where both I and presumably Gemini knew very little about: 1) this library, 2) the new @dart.dev hooks feature. We had a starting point, a desired end goal and a lot of vagueness in the middle and some key parts where I wasn't able to provide strong guidance.
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
I started from a position where both I and presumably Gemini knew very little about: 1) this library, 2) the new @dart.dev hooks feature. We had a starting point, a desired end goal and a lot of vagueness in the middle and some key parts where I wasn't able to provide strong guidance.
Anyways, this is basically what I wanted to build. A nice clean interface that let's be go from Dart to CBOR, have it automatically handle all of the deterministic part of it for me and then back again to Dart. All without having to know anything about C or manual memory management.
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Anyways, this is basically what I wanted to build. A nice clean interface that let's be go from Dart to CBOR, have it automatically handle all of the deterministic part of it for me and then back again to Dart. All without having to know anything about C or manual memory management.
This is where the last piece of the puzzle comes in which is Antigravity which is an interesting new IDE (based on VSCode) from @developers.google.com it was my first time actually working with an AI specific editor and despite a few hiccups I have to say it's hard going back to VSCode honestly...
Google Antigravity
Google Antigravity - Build the new way
antigravity.google
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
This is where the last piece of the puzzle comes in which is Antigravity which is an interesting new IDE (based on VSCode) from @developers.google.com it was my first time actually working with an AI specific editor and despite a few hiccups I have to say it's hard going back to VSCode honestly...
At this point the tooling takes over, generates all the relevant binding code so that I now have typesafe Dart <-> C functions I can call essentially like I am just working with any other Dart code. I say essentially but the truth is that I know almost nothing about C & memory management.
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
At this point the tooling takes over, generates all the relevant binding code so that I now have typesafe Dart <-> C functions I can call essentially like I am just working with any other Dart code. I say essentially but the truth is that I know almost nothing about C & memory management.
Here is a quick code sample showing you how I am able to hook up the EverCBOR C library from @microsoft.com into my code so that the build tooling will automatically compile the relevant C code & expose it in my app. The second file is where I specify what C functions I want to call. That's it!
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Here is a quick code sample showing you how I am able to hook up the EverCBOR C library from @microsoft.com into my code so that the build tooling will automatically compile the relevant C code & expose it in my app. The second file is where I specify what C functions I want to call. That's it!
The @dart.dev team (cc: @kevmoo.com @labenz.dev @sethladd.com) have been hard at work bringing some real improvements lately to how Dart interacts with code in other languages (especially C) in the form of a new feature called hooks. dart.dev/tools/hooks
Hooks
Run custom build scripts.
dart.dev
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
The @dart.dev team (cc: @kevmoo.com @labenz.dev @sethladd.com) have been hard at work bringing some real improvements lately to how Dart interacts with code in other languages (especially C) in the form of a new feature called hooks. dart.dev/tools/hooks
The CBOR specific library is called EverCBOR and it focuses on the fully deterministic CBOR part of the the official IETF specification. As a developer you can wrap that C or Rust library and use it in the language of your choice which in my case is @dart.dev which has full C-inteop out of the box.
C interop using dart:ffi
To use C code in your Dart program, use the dart:ffi library.
dart.dev
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
The CBOR specific library is called EverCBOR and it focuses on the fully deterministic CBOR part of the the official IETF specification. As a developer you can wrap that C or Rust library and use it in the language of your choice which in my case is @dart.dev which has full C-inteop out of the box.
One of the formats they focused on was CBOR. Basically the deal is: they write a formally verifiable specification in F* that guarantees the code it produces will work exactly as it says on the box and without memory safety issues. It spits out a C and Rust library you can use. More details here.
Verified efficient parsing for binary data formats — EverParse Manual documentation
project-everest.github.io
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
One of the formats they focused on was CBOR. Basically the deal is: they write a formally verifiable specification in F* that guarantees the code it produces will work exactly as it says on the box and without memory safety issues. It spits out a C and Rust library you can use. More details here.
Building on top of this is some truly groundbreaking research from @microsoft.com who spent a lot of time and effort into launching a framework for generating verified secure parsers and formatters from domain-specific format specification languages. It was a huge deal in the cybersecurity community
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Building on top of this is some truly groundbreaking research from @microsoft.com who spent a lot of time and effort into launching a framework for generating verified secure parsers and formatters from domain-specific format specification languages. It was a huge deal in the cybersecurity community
First, let me just quickly introduce the various pieces of the puzzle. Starting with CBOR. You can think of it basically as JSON but binary. It's much smaller, faster and with added type safety. It's designed to be a long term stable data serialization format. datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc...
RFC 8949: Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)
The Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a data format whose design goals include the possibility of extremely small code size, fairly small message size, and extensibility without the need ...
datatracker.ietf.org
December 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
First, let me just quickly introduce the various pieces of the puzzle. Starting with CBOR. You can think of it basically as JSON but binary. It's much smaller, faster and with added type safety. It's designed to be a long term stable data serialization format. datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc...
Incoming this weekend!
December 5, 2025 at 5:28 PM
Incoming this weekend!
Reposted
Josh's rad post icymi www.joshwcomeau.com/css/subgrid/
Brand New Layouts with CSS Subgrid • Josh W. Comeau
Subgrid allows us to extend a grid template down through the DOM tree, so that deeply-nested elements can participate in the same grid layout. At first glance, I thought this would be a helpful conven...
www.joshwcomeau.com
November 27, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Josh's rad post icymi www.joshwcomeau.com/css/subgrid/
Is this still open? This is very literally my day job. I *also* happen to be a Dart developer whos super into server side use-cases and interested in seeing you guys succeed. Let me know, I think it's a great fit.
November 27, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Is this still open? This is very literally my day job. I *also* happen to be a Dart developer whos super into server side use-cases and interested in seeing you guys succeed. Let me know, I think it's a great fit.
In the meantime I find myself writing code like this to just straight up stop them since they don't offer any other kind of opt-out mechanisms that you can trust. Even this isn't enough, it's just the opening move in a game of whack-a-mole unfortunately.
bsky.app/profile/drop...
bsky.app/profile/drop...
In real life the problem is obviously more complicated than this but it's a good start all the same. I'm writing a server using @dart.dev and @kevmoo.com Shelf package to just intercept many of the most common bots before they can ever reach my site. Look how easy they make this.
November 27, 2025 at 12:57 PM
In the meantime I find myself writing code like this to just straight up stop them since they don't offer any other kind of opt-out mechanisms that you can trust. Even this isn't enough, it's just the opening move in a game of whack-a-mole unfortunately.
bsky.app/profile/drop...
bsky.app/profile/drop...
You as a developer also just feel better mentally working in a code base that doesn't impose all of this hidden complexity where it feels like you're walking through a landmine all the time.
November 27, 2025 at 12:51 PM
You as a developer also just feel better mentally working in a code base that doesn't impose all of this hidden complexity where it feels like you're walking through a landmine all the time.
Right, let us 1. Steal your shit. 2. Without your permission. 3. For our profit. 4. You also have to pay extra for all the bandwidth we used with our badly behaved bots.
November 26, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Right, let us 1. Steal your shit. 2. Without your permission. 3. For our profit. 4. You also have to pay extra for all the bandwidth we used with our badly behaved bots.
Spent a few minutes to write some custom middleware on a server I am building recently to just begin stopping them at the source.
bsky.app/profile/drop...
bsky.app/profile/drop...
In real life the problem is obviously more complicated than this but it's a good start all the same. I'm writing a server using @dart.dev and @kevmoo.com Shelf package to just intercept many of the most common bots before they can ever reach my site. Look how easy they make this.
November 26, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Spent a few minutes to write some custom middleware on a server I am building recently to just begin stopping them at the source.
bsky.app/profile/drop...
bsky.app/profile/drop...