funkaster (u/funkaster)

funkaster commented on Lisp: Notes on its Past and Future (1980) www-formal.stanford.edu/j... · Posted by u/birdculture

labrador · 2 months ago

It occurred to me this morning that I should learn Clojure instead of Rust for non-lowlevel code because Clojure solves the same problems Rust solves in a much simpler way. I'm a fan of Clojure author Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk but otherwise don't know either language in detail and need to do more research.

funkaster · 2 months ago

I would recommend taking a look at some of the schemes. In particular I've been having tons of fun with CHICKEN: https://call-cc.org/ - the fact that it compiles to C and can generate binaries is a great plus.

funkaster commented on Making web testing pleasant in Scheme: Schematra 0.4 schematra.com/blog/whats-... · Posted by u/funkaster

dannyobrien · 2 months ago

Thank you for writing this! Do you know how much work it would be to generalise to other Schemes, like say Guile?

funkaster · 2 months ago

All of it? probably not a small effort. Parts of it like chiccup html generation, maybe a couple of days, assuming there's something similar to sxml in the target scheme.

But for Guile in particular there's https://artanis.dev/ that's a pretty close cousin.

funkaster commented on Making web testing pleasant in Scheme: Schematra 0.4 schematra.com/blog/whats-... · Posted by u/funkaster

otoolep · 2 months ago

rqlite[1] creator here. Thanks for the shout-out in your blog post.

https://rqlite.io

funkaster · 2 months ago

thanks for creating it! I'm really impressed by how easy was to use for dev and prod.

funkaster commented on Making web testing pleasant in Scheme: Schematra 0.4 schematra.com/blog/whats-... · Posted by u/funkaster

funkaster · 2 months ago

I just shipped Schematra 0.4 with some updates based on some usage and feedback.

Testing ergonomics: Went from 15+ lines of boilerplate to a one-liner by introducing structural testing. Routes can now return S-expressions (chiccup) instead of rendered HTML, so you test against data structures, not string parsing.

  ;; Assert against structure, not HTML strings
  (test "returns greeting"
    '(ccup [h1 "Hello"])
    (test-route-body app 'GET "/hello"))

Structural middleware: Since routes return S-expressions and rendering happens at the framework boundary, middleware can inspect and transform the DOM structure before it becomes HTML. Want to inject CSRF tokens into every form? It's just an S-expression transform with sxml-transforms. No template engine plugins needed. (see the post for a complete example)

Performance notes: I benchmarked chiccup rendering at 145k ops/sec average (339k for simple elements, 2k for 50-row tables). Even worst case is 0.5ms - way below database/network latency, so no caching layer needed, at least not for now.

What's next: Besides the Redis-backed job queue and rqlite-based ORM mentioned in the full post, I'm working on improving route handling with automatic path parameter extraction:

  (get "/posts/:id/comments"
    ;; :id automatically becomes a local variable
    (display id))  ; just works, no (alist-ref 'id params) needed

Schematra is a Sinatra-inspired web framework for CHICKEN Scheme. Still pre-1.0, API is evolving based on real-world use.

Full post: https://schematra.com/blog/whats-new-in-schematra-0-4

Source: https://github.com/schematra/schematra

Benchmarks: https://github.com/schematra/schematra/tree/main/benchmarks

funkaster commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025) · Posted by u/david927

tristanMatthias · 2 months ago

https://avanci.design

Taking a break from tech to work on a luxury fashion brand with my mum. She hand paints all the designs. I it first collection is a set of silk scarves and we’re moving into skirts and jackets soon.

Been a wonderful journey to connect with my mum in this way. And also to make something physical that I can actually touch. Tech seems so…ephemeral at times

funkaster · 2 months ago

this is super cool. congrats and best of luck with it! Love the mother & son backstory to the product. The scarves look like they could make a great gift as well. I'll bookmark your website.

funkaster commented on Robots move Shanghai city block [video] youtube.com/watch?v=7ZccC... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

bmmayer1 · 6 months ago

This is incredible -- serious question -- has anything of this scale been done in the US or Europe? Do we even have the technology?

funkaster · 6 months ago

lower tech/scale but in Chile (in the island of Chiloe) they have been doing this for centuries for individual houses: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moving-houses-of-chilo... - although no smart jacks, only bulls and people.