New Startup VoidZero Receives $4.6M Funding for JavaScript ToolingPermalink

Evan You:

I have founded VoidZero Inc., a company dedicated to building an open-source, high-performance, and unified development toolchain for the JavaScript ecosystem. We have raised $4.6 million in seed funding, led by Accel.

Picking up where the Rome Tools project failed, VoidZero hopes to build a suite of high-performance tools atop a common foundation: the Oxc toolset implemented in Rust.

The goals are admirable and as the creator of Vue.js and Vite Evan You has a track record of making tools that gain adoption, but there’s no mention of how they plan to make US$4.6M plus return for investors.

iOS Safari Show StoppersPermalink

Roderick E.J.H. Gadellaa:

iOS Safari is more than an inconvenience for developers, it’s the fundamental reason interoperability has been stymied in mobile ecosystems; frequent showstopping bugs, a large patch gap, and lack of competing engines ensures the web is not a credible competitor to native. Here are the receipts to prove it.

Incredibly detailed and well researched collection of bugs in Safari on iOS over the years. The bugs would be fine if it were possible to use a browser with anything other than the version of WebKit Apple ships on the OS, but unless you’re in the EU that isn’t possible.

Halloy IRC ClientPermalink

Casper Storm on Mastodon:

Halloy is my spare-time project I’ve been working on for a little over a year. Halloy is an open-source IRC client written in #rustlang , using the Iced GUI library. I love the IRC, and I’m happy to be able to give something back to the community I’ve been connected to for over 20 years!

Really nice take on a cross-platform IRC client. It’s got a subdued and text-centric UI, but because it’s built with a GUI framework it’s got a few niceties that aren’t possible with a TUI in the terminal.

Illumos Open to Rust ContributorsPermalink

Till Wegmüller:

With all this said I would love to have some more rust folks in the illumos community. And I know this has been expressed by others as well. Userland tools are easy to make in Rust and I for one would love to have people help me with the new Installer and with the package Forge We have gained rust crates for our unique API’s such as libcontract Our new image builder for ISO’s is in rust image-builder and we are always looking for driver developers.

For folks wanting to dabble with Rust in a battle-hardened production open-source operating system Illumos seems like a great option.

PDF to HTMLPermalink

My day job involves working on the Prince HTML to PDF converter. Simon Willison used LLMs to do the reverse:

Google Research released a PDF paper describing their new pipe syntax for SQL. I ran it through Gemini 1.5 Pro to convert it to HTML (prompts here) and got this—a pretty great initial result for the first prompt I tried!