/smg/ - Software Minimalism General

For discussing software and hardware minimalism. >What is computing minimalism? http://www.linfo.org/unix_philosophy.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism_(computing) >Why software minimalism? - Fewer bugs - Better performance - Lower memory footprint - Better maintainability - Higher scalability - Longer software lifetime - Smaller attack surface >List of minimal OSes and distros >Obscure minimal Plan 9, FreeDOS, Minix3, Genode >Meme minimal Crux, Void, GuixSD, FreeBSD, SourceMage >Autistic minimal Gentoo, Alpine, OpenBSD, LFS >Most sane minimal Arch Linux (Archinstall), Debian (netinst) >Useful links Suckless: https://suckless.org/rocks Cat-v.org: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ Window Managers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers Without Systemd: http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_systemd Alternatives to Bloatware: https://github.com/mayfrost/guides/blob/master/ALTERNATIVES.md >Website development http://werc.cat-v.org/ https://learnbchs.org/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ Minimalism is not a lack of something. It's simply the perfect amount of something.(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST, OP is soykaf , is a fake general in search of an actual discussion that by not elaborating or further detailing starting discussion points spills the soykaf and doesn't present in good faith.)

>>62082 I think everyone ITT should read the Worse Is Better essay: https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html >sxiv Unmaintained. Use nsxiv: https://codeberg.org/nsxiv/nsxiv >LFS It's not practical because you have to maintain everything yourself. >Arch Linux >Minimal It's not. They compile in almost every option. Arch also uses systemd which is not minimal at all. You could install Artix but Gentoo is more comfy because you can disable stuff easily using USE flags. >Minimalism is not a lack of something. Some people use it as excuse to not make something feature complete (this is the case with DWM, just install Awesome instead). Also, patches are inferior to config files (and applying some random patch you found online is not secure but using a random config file usually is not as bad).

Which is more minimal: programs reimplementing the same things incompatibly, or a larger base system programs may reuse? I just finished reading this: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/LogTimestampFormats Consider a system in which there were a standard format for timestamps, and one which needn't be parsed to be understood; wouldn't that be better? I don't see Emacs Lisp programs reimplementing things Emacs already provides to them. Lastly, it's laughable to call those millions of lines of garbage minimalism. Yes, hate complicated software and value minimalism barely long enough to stop at exactly this garbage we have. Don't budge in either direction. Why?

>>62082 In my experience, the main advantage of minimalist software is not that it is easier to run (my computer has more than enough power for bloatware), but rather that it is most often optimized for the more tech-obsessed users that tend to get drawn to such software. Notepad is "minimalist", however VIM offers far far far more features that optimize the experienced user's experience. I run I3 not because it is less resource intensive than a desktop environment, but rather because I find it extremely useful for managing multiple windows with ease.

>>62094 >nsxiv Thanks. I used sxiv now I replaced it with that. There is lot to talk about but OP is glitterboy. Maybe I would make new OP image for this kind of threads.

>>63511 As I said, made new pic. What do you think guys? It comes from my personal experiences.

>>63513 You should definitely also add Alpine Linux to the list. Alpine is a truly minimal distro: it uses musl, there aren't GNU utils by default (instead it uses Busybox), there are split packages (unlike in Arch or Artix), no systemd... Only Gentoo can be more minimal but you have to build your packages yourself using the portage package manager (it's mostly automated), so it may not be the best option for a laptop/low-end PC, unless you use distcc. You should remove the Web Browsers section because web browsers are the epitome of software bloat. You could replace it with a small section about IRC (irssi), Gopher (lynx) and Gemini (amfora)? I would call the section "Software for Communication" or "Online Comms" or something similar. The file manager section could also have a mention of Midnight Commander (mc)? The list of WMs could contain Sway as well. Also, I'm glad you listed NeoVim instead of Vim. Otherwise the poster looks good.

>>63522 I used musl as a daily driver for about half a year. I had to switch back to a GNU libc based distro after multiple segfaults from software that crutched on non-standard behavior. Advise for those planning on using Alpine as a workstation OS -- proprietary software expects glibc, and I didn't have the time to put effort in "fixing" the binaries. Avoid mozilla software if you can, that usually was the source of segfaults.

>>63513 There is nothing minimal about Artix, Devuan or Gentoo. They all have fully featured package managers. > i3 and bspwm > IPC protocols Yeah, not minimal. I will pass on saying Firefox is not minimal because there does not exist such thing as a functional minimal browser. The modern web spec encompasses so much, perhaps it is a good thing perhaps it is a bad thing. I am not here to make either argument. > PCManFM Have you seen the state of libfm? Not minimal at all dear goodness. I know nothing about lf. Again skipping saying anything but this time about video/music players. The very nature of stuff they have to deal with makes minimalism nonsensical. Assuming nsxiv is still keeping to its sxiv roots then both it and feh use imlib2, not minimal. > neovim Not minimal, last time I looked into it it depends on libuv for their fancy async stuff. > zsh How is this minimal? Have you looked at the source code? Same thing for urxvt, it is an abomination. The only "minimal" software on that image is `st`. I am not saying any of the software is bad, they are all tools at the end of the day but the majority fail to fit the bill of minimalism. What I see is popular software used by ricers on this list which again is nothing wrong.

>>63524 Devuan, i3, and IPC are not minimal? The reason neovim is not minimal, of all reasons, is because it depends on libuv? What is even the point of minimalism for you? The pragmatics of minimalism is reducing the surface area a user has to touch to operate their system, no? Why do you give these weird criteria for deciding if something is minimalist or not?

>>63524 Okay, is this better?

I have used both Alpine and the musl variant of Void. In my experience things worked better on Alpine. >>63523 >musl >segfaults This mostly affects GUI programs. > proprietary software expects glibc, This is very true.

There is more to security than just a small attack surface. Use Windows 11 (with a Microsoft account and use the default Microsoft apps when possible), MacOS, or ChromeOS on desktop and GrapheneOS or stock Android on a Google Pixel. Use Chromium browsers only, preferably Microsoft Edge on Windows, Google Chrome on other desktop devices and stock android, and Vanadium on GrapheneOS. If you must use Linux, use a distro with systemd as it can sandbox system services and only use GNOME or KDE since they support Wayland. Install Flatpaks as much as possible.

>>63524 >Gentoo >not minimal Either you don't know what you are talking about or you are trolling. Gentoo and Portage allow you to disable features from packages (thus your system is less bloated). Devuan is more minimal than Arch/Artix because it has split packages (you just need to use the netinst iso and don't select any software sets). >They all have fully featured package managers. A package manager is not bloat but rather useful and frankly needed component of a fully functional operating system. Hunting down patches and compiling software from extracted tarballs is not sane if you need to do it to your whole OS (like LFS).

>>63536 Frankly, it would be better to assume that they do not know what they are talking about because assuming they are trolling feels almost bad faith. Gentoo is one of the most lightweight, easiest to use distros around. The only difficulty filter that exists for Gentoo is not knowing how to read the manual.

Is there something like a fsf approved minimal distro? Guix perhaps?

>>63551 guix is the only fsf approved distro that isnt a complete meme debian/devuan/gentoo are not fsf approved but can be 100% libre and as minimal as you want them to be, if you like the guix packet manager you can use it on any of these

>>63536 >>63543 > Either you don't know what you are talking about or you are trolling. Assuming I am trolling or not knowing what I am talking about is bad faith in itself. I just was voicing my thoughts, I understand you disagree but no need to be mean. I might very well be wrong, what I say is not the word of God. You can disagree and maybe if you explain why you disagree I can understand you better. I hope I can elucidate why I personally think in general distributions are not minimal (read this does not mean distros are bloat, to say such would be a false dichotomy). That being said Gentoo does embody user choice which in turn can be said fosters users to run minimalist software (or run with all the bells and whistles). Distros typically boil down to their package management system. For example a Debian based distribution would use DEB as the package format (giving dpkg), and likely APT as the front-end package manager tool. Already you have some abstraction with them this is fine, package management is a thankless hell and package managers already do so much free work why make it harder on them. That being said it strays from minimalism since the added levels of abstraction, it is not bloat just necessary abstraction to deal with complexity. It is what us humans like to do when dealing with problems of the complex variety but usually it takes away from being minimal. The point where abstractions are needed to do deal with legacy state is painfully anti-minimalism. Ideally with minimalism you remove not add. For example APT is written in C++ which is a language perfectly acceptable in my opinion for creating a minimal application (rarely does the language omit something from being minimal). In most cases I have worked with I know that I can get a (mostly compliant) C compiler running. I generally can also get a C++ compiler running with much pain but it is an additional dependency that I did not need before. Hence adding something to the schema of the operating system. For Gentoo we have Portage which is written in Python which means I have this level of abstraction too and am adding something I once did not require. Not that Portage is bloat just that it means you now added something with an indirect dependency when you describe your operating system, it required me to install a language. Somethings inherently require complexity and minimalism is necessarily traded for the cost of abstraction. Other times pragmatically you just want to compile some C++ code or run some Python code but a system which arbitrarily necessitates additional requirements is not and cannot be minimal to me. General purpose operating systems have no bottom since the requirements are constantly change. Not to mention Gentoo is a from-source distribution, meaning at minimum I am pulling the GNU compiler collection. Can you really call that minimal? But I am allowing a C compiler in my prior examples! Yes, but it was a non-arbitrary requirement. In addition, the host machine is not always the target machine. On the host machine I compile source code and have a resulting binary, I distribute this binary and people run it. This is more minimal than requiring people to obtain source code, compile said source code and install it. In my area of work, I describe operating systems declaratively and in turn they are generated and amount to a few kilobytes in total size (the UI is text, blessed be text), minimal binary blobs that are operating systems (it has all the hallmarks of a textbook operating systems). This is largely because the abstraction does not exist within the operating system but when I declare them before hand. The result is a tightly knitted (minimal) operating system that does its job nothing more and nothing less. If you want a general purpose OS, you will duly necessitate abstraction otherwise you condemn yourself to amalgamated horrors (i.e. bloat). This is another reason why distributions are not minimal by their very purpose of being general purpose. How can something be minimal if it is supposed to be general? > Gentoo and Portage allow you to disable features from packages (thus your system is less bloated). If I am to follow your argument that Gentoo and Portage are minimal then autotools/autoconf/autohell would have to be minimal too. They allows you to disable features from packages (thus your system is less bloated). Given that ignores that Portage consumes ebuilds which wrap around autohell logic (necessarily) because no one sane would carry patches that replace entire build systems in the sake of minimalism. In addition disabling features from packages does not mean minimalism, it just means you disabled features. Say I am compiling FFmpeg because I want to convert an AVI to MP4, but I pass `--disable-encoders`that would make it pretty pointless. Features are only bloat if they baked in, waste resources and do not serve a purpose to you. > Devuan is more minimal than Arch/Artix because it has split packages (you just need to use the netinst iso and don't select any software sets). But this is comparing package sets and how minimal you can make package sets. Operating systems are independent to whatever package set a distribution offers. However if you view it in that sense, sure you could say x distro is more minimal than y distro. In the scheme of operating systems though, package managers are not minimal. > A package manager is not bloat but rather useful and frankly needed component of a fully functional operating system. Hunting down patches and compiling software from extracted tarballs is not sane if you need to do it to your whole OS (like LFS). I agree a package manager is not bloat, I never said it was. I know what package managers offer and their usefulness. However it does exclude the distribution from being minimal. Given a distribution with the specific set of packages I can make it more "minimal" by subtracting out the package manager, and its related dependencies. Even more minimal than LFS since you still would have the development toolchains for LFS on the operating system. As for saying operating systems require a package manager to be "fully functional" that seems wrong to me. I have a personal computer desktop operating system. It exists without a package manager and I think it is fully functional for my needs. Given a configuration (the software packages I want installed, their configuration files, other minor details) it generates an immutable turnkey image that I can boot. It is really nice because I can make bootable USBs (UEFI and BIOS) which allows me to take my operating system set up exactly how I want where I want. I would still be hesitant to call it a minimal set up though for a multitude of reasons. > Gentoo is one of the most lightweight, easiest to use distros around. The only difficulty filter that exists for Gentoo is not knowing how to read the manual. Lightweight in what sense, the base install or resources or something else? Same thing for "easiest" in what sense? If you are visually impaired getting Gentoo to a usable state is a struggle. Ultimately Gentoo is what you make it, it is a metadistribution. A metadistribution which depends on Portage. Still not a minimal operating system.

>>63571 So you understand minimalism is relative, yet you feel the need to correct people when they refer to something as minimal that you think does not meet some technical, objective definition of minimal. That is insufferable, pedantic bullshit. Most people have a brain that is capable of interpreting the context other people are referring to.

>>63571 Thanks for the detailed reply. > You can disagree and maybe if you explain why you disagree I prefer to have a package manager and I think Portage is better than the rest (but FreeBSD ports is close) because I can easily disable features from other programs, so the system as whole is less bloated. >autotools/autoconf/autohell would have to be minimal too. Build systems that allow you to disable features in programs result in less bloated binaries. But the problem is that autotools are hard to use and the makefiles they generate are hard to read (unlike ebuilds).

>>63574 Can FreeBSD ports: * Install multiple version of the same library (bonus: without having packages named libfoo2, libfoo3, etc..). * Specify options (USE flags for Portage) in dependencies? Otherwise, I expect some major problems not handled by the package manager. * Apply patches easily (user patches and savedconfig for Portage).

You all show know that no one in this world cares about what software you use, in other words, using suckless and minimalistic software that only makes everything most complex for yourself doesn't make you more cool than anyone else.

>>63577 >using suckless and minimalistic software that only makes everything most complex for yourself Nice projection.

>>63579 How to say you're smarter than someone in the most roundabout way possible.

>>63573 No one is correcting anyone. They asked what people thought of their picture. I voiced my thoughts. They disagreed and gave some reason as to why. I tried to explained my position better and why I disagreed with their disagreement. Ignoring how "tl;dr minimalism is relative" misses the point I was trying to make, I am sorry you feel like I am insufferable or pedantic, it was not my intention.

>>63571 >no need to be mean I was not intending to be mean when I said it is better to assume you do not know what you are talking about. Ignorance is not something I use as an insult. I find that to be of poor character to claim ignorance indicates the individual to be less valuable. >Given that ignores that Portage consumes ebuilds The specifics would need to be somewhere. Otherwise we would just build from source ourselves, which would lead to the argument that package managers are inherently bloated. Which you, yourself, do not agree with. >In addition disabling features from packages does not mean minimalism The point was that it can. If I disable certain features, certain other programs aren't necessary to install. This may reduce the amount of software installed. >Features are only bloat if they baked in, waste resources and do not serve a purpose to you That was my point. Although, thanks to your elaboration, I don't think we really disagreed on much.

>>63513 Feels like you sharing all that luke smith uses.

>>63526 Bloated soykaf. DECADES OF FILE MANAGEMENT yet NO REAL WORLD USE found for a file manager. Want to anyway for a laugh? We have tools for that: THEY'RE CALLED CD, MV, CP FILES WERE NOT MEANT TO BE VIEWED DIRECTLY ed is the standard editor If there's only one POSIX STANDARD why make so many shells??? "please make your program compatible with urxvt. Just compile it to work on st" - Statements dreamed up by the Utterly Deranged

>>63532 Do the exact opposite of this and you should be fine.

>>64702 What's wrong with flatpak? Granted, it's not as good as AppImages, but cmon

>>64703 >What's wrong with flatpak? Everything from this site: https://flatkill.org The sandbox is a lie, since most Flatpak packages have access to your $HOME. And everyone can submit a Flatpak package to Flathub repo (so it has the same problems as AUR: the packages can be malicious, and you need to read the source code for the package before you install it). And due to the design of Flatpak, you will install multiple copies of the same libraries (like on Winblows). I think the main use-case for Flatpak is to distribute proprietary software (and I believe it's only good for that purpose). There is also another good article: https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future

>>62082 you do release that no one use's vim in an actual professional environment right?

>>63526 >VHS tapes as media viewer uhh bro those are media storage, its my vcr player and TV that are the viewer >>64714 you say that because you're dumb. get over it people use all sorts of things. Real complaint here about vim should be the fact that its OBSCENE BLOAT.

>>64715 What's a good alternative to vim?

>>64716 >What's a good alternative to vim? NeoVim Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA! But you can also use Emacs or vis. Some crazy people use Acme.

>>64716 Vi! Ed! Nano! the other Vis! Maybe JOE? mg? world is full of text editors

>>64718 >JOE I think the only reason to use JOE is that if you have already learned to use WordStar or Borland Turbo C.

>>62082 >amount of something Ship's probably sailed, but this ought to be called minimal software or software minimization. "Minimalist software" in a practical sense would be that which requires minimal human effort or involvement to operate. This thread is more hobbyist, which is in many ways the opposite of minimalism. >>63787 >t. Scott Forstall

>>62094 >It's not. They compile in almost every option. what do you mean by this? (Arch Linux)

>>63787 >NO REAL WORLD USE found for a file manager you can have keybinds on them to do things that you would do in a terminal, but faster, also there can be a terminal built in to them I use a terminal interface file manager (lf) things it can do is show the prev directory and the contents of the one you are on, execute, open move, copy files around with a button and single button navigation and shortcuts llike 'a, 'e to go to immediately warp to a directory anywhere in your system. rename files after/before the extension, delete name and rename from scratch, show previews of videos(thumbnail) images and pdfs/txt just by navigating over it, pretty much it makes it so that you can do anything with just a few key presses and the navigation is much faster-for places you dont have shortcuts for

>>65363 >what do you mean by this? probably that arch linux enables every feature of the kernel.

>>65363 >>65368 would it not still be in the category of minimal, relatively?

>>65363 >what do you mean by this? No split packages, and that 1 package contains a lot of stuff. Also, Gentoo actually allows you to disable stuff (at build time) that's normally enabled in most distros. >>65391 >is Arch minimal No. Arch is not minimal OS. Compare it with Alpine Linux (musl+Busybox for everything by default + there are split packages) or Gentoo (see above). Even Debian (or better, Devuan) is more minimal if you use the netinstall iso (+ don't select any software sets) and disable recommended and suggested packages in APT config before you install anything. Also, Arch uses Systemd which is not minimal by any definition of the word. But that being said, however, Arch Linux is a good distro but it's not minimal.

>>62082 Crux and Sourcemage deserve to be in autistic minimal, they offer real minimalism at least gentoo levels

>>63552 >the guix packet manager that's actually my reason not to use guix

>>62082 I haven’t seen /smg/ in a few years, nice.

Would Slackware coumt? You can pretty much slim it down to LFS and the package manager doesn't do much except for looking at the remote changelog.

>>65517 Slackware would count as minimalist if you count tracking each dependency by hand as a minimalist user experience.

>>62094 >Unmaintained updates on a finished peice of software like sxiv are bloat

>>65519 sxiv as it stood had blemishes, it wasn't finished. 17 open PR's and 45+1 open Issues before it was archived ought to demonstrate this (the +1 being making nsxiv to consolidate the multiple forks that was in existence to continue the project).

>>65519 1. New formats. 2. Keeping up with imlib2 that can finally do gif, webp and animated images (to replace giflib).

to this day i think acme has the best implementation of mouse-based tiling and i get fuarrrking pissed when i have to use some MDI piece of soykaf for work

>>62082 >Permacomputing >http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html Seeks to reuse old hardware with minimalist software to avoid ecological collapse in climate change'd world. This is the cyberpunk we deserve.

>>62082 Your image is kinda wrong, Arch isn't really minimal. Look at the way they split their packages... Debian is the best "minimal" system-D distro.

>>66295 don't want to imagine the autism levels the dude who made this picture has

>>62082 Minimalism in Software is hard to come by. I have recently discovered the dead technical culture of Win32 Asm and I have been thinking about how elitism has effectively killed software minimalism and assembly programming. The Win32 ASM Scene appears to have been dedicated to producing contemporarily "state of the art" applications, including with a GUI in assembly. Today, this sounds absurd - in rings of the joke O'Reilly book Webapps in Assembly but look how easy it is: start: invoke GetModuleHandle, NULL mov hInstance,eax invoke DialogBoxParam, hInstance, 1001, NULL, addr DlgProc, NULL invoke ExitProcess,eax DlgProc proc hWnd:HWND, uMsg:UINT, wParam:WPARAM, lParam:LPARAM .if uMsg == WM_COMMAND mov eax,wParam .if eax==1003 invoke SetDlgItemText,hWnd,1002,ADDR Message .elseif eax==1004 invoke SendMessage, hWnd, WM_CLOSE, 0, 0 .endif .elseif uMsg == WM_CLOSE invoke EndDialog, hWnd, 0 .endif xor eax,eax ret DlgProc endp end start Further the GUI is has a text based description similar to C Programing Syntax (CF. GTK's XML) The Assembler has a type system with static type checking. Comparing this today to GAS or NASM, is terrible. We insist on "bare" mnemonics or limited compile time macros, but the result is that no one develops in assembly - you would be an idiot to bet on maintenance of your non-hobby software as NASM/GAS. We effectively have relegated assembly to inline or to access hardware specific features in small places, but here is an example of a culture producing minimalist software entirely in assembly because its so usable. The example is taken from Win32 Assembler Programming for Crackers which is worth checking out. I have been able to use jwasm + wine-devel, and mingw tools chains to cross assemble, build and run the examples including GUI apps on a fedora linux box. It has been an en-lighting experience for a GAS user. GAS doesn't support basic features (cf. nasm struc) because assembly isn't intended to be handwritten, gas is simply a target for GCC. I would like to find am assembler that is designed for people to write software in. It really enables a deep understanding of the machine, and encourages minimalism.

>>62082 >>63513 >>63526 First, for your infographics, https://www.slant.co/topics/18337/~sans-serif-fonts-where-an-l-is-clearly-distinguished-from-an-i Second, there MUST BE a second application in whatever category. Alternatives are mandatory. Third, VHS tapes and Photographs. Grow up and think about that harder. Fourth, each of your infographics are relevant, but each reaction solution is defined entirely by unknown metrics. DEFINE EACH infographic... as being 15% less than mainstream, of the idea or theory or design of such and the whatever, a preamble, a title. Fifth, logos only, is bad design. Can't type in a logo to a search engine. Did you guys just learn handwriting yesterday? Put the name on stuff, make whats necessary data-rich enough to be of access

>>63552 >>65412 Guix is so autistic. Hope you like learning a Lisp dialect to install your operating system. Somehow I got it to bootstrap a compiler built from a series of micro-compilers once... i don't like how it seems to install new copies of package dependencies every time you install something, how there is zero filesystem transparency on what the fuarrrk is installed on your computer and how you are basically the bitch of the package manager and it's Lisp dialect for doing absolutely anything. If this soykaf is the 'future' of package management then we are fuarrrked.

>>67471 This is dope. We could be writing a so ewhat "highlevel assembly", and that would be miles ahead of C. There's really nothing stopping you from writing a rudimentary mafro preprocessor for your assembly, though. Abstract out the usual functikn frames and branching and whatnot and implement a parser that expands those macros.

>>67471 What are your thoughts on FORTH?

>>67492 I am interested in learning about it - the only worry that I have is that it will be disconnected from the platform. I feel like C is a very expressive language, where as most peoples favorite alt langs can't make syscalls or do FFI.

That must be the stupidest OP for minimalist software ever. Minimal software doesn't do much alone, they become usefull as you build things on top of others. Majority of users here would know most of those things but here it comes(yes, in text format, fuarrrk infodump images). >dash shell Small, fast and posix compiant, this is for scripting, link this to /bin/sh. Now posix compliant scripts run significantly more efficient on your system. It is soo basic "man dash" would give just about anything you need to use it >sxhkd manage your keybinds from here, not window manager configuration. window mangers should manage windows, not execute software and scripts. >herbe notification tool, not a deamon. It works well with scripts. >gnutools read most of the manuals or at least the few word descriptions. >dmenu it is a menu, does menu things. If you aren't a special kid, the software above should suffice to automate majority of your computer usage. If you are making things harder for you by using minimal software, you are doing something extremely wrong. Minimalism isn't having as little soykaf on your computer as possible, it is having executables that do one thing and do it well.

>>67490 >Hope you like learning a Lisp dialect to install your operating system. It's still better than NixOS because at least the language (Scheme/Guile) is not an obscure DSL. If you learn Scheme, it might be useful out side of Guix/Guix system distro. >>67492 Forth and Factor looks really interesting. Starting Forth and Thinking Forth are on my reading list. But I have no idea how you would make anything non-trivial with Forth, though...?

>>67713 I highly recommend both books! As for non-trivial I don't know what you mean but I recently made an http web server that can do server-side rendering à la php but it's forth. It uses unix sockets. I also tried porting uxn (and somewhat succeeded) to the web using waforth, it worked but due to the Harvard architecture of the WASM vm, the performance was pretty bad... And 2 month ago I got started making my own vm that uses some kind of colorforth for it's assembly language. I guess this is on topic too, so I'll happily talk about this project if people are interested. Some highlights: When computing primes with the sieve of erathosten, the performance was very close to lua. The vm (runtime) is 40KB. You can make graphical programs in a few KB. I made a custom editor for the language which is based on Antirez' kilo, so it has a fairly small footprint too (54KB). The core of the vm is 200 lines of C. Pic related is a screenshot of a little piece of code along with the code running in the vm.

>>67719 >And 2 month ago I got started making my own vm that uses some kind of colorforth for it's assembly language. That looks super interesting! Looks like you have worked pretty hard. I would be interested in hearing more. Also, is it open source?

>>63526 Just replace vi with pen and notebook.

>>67804 >Just replace vi with pen and notebook Punch cards.

>>63524 Minimal means soykaf then? What's the point of this thread oh look I've got this piece of toilet paper its so light I can't do anything with it apart from wiping my ass but its soo minimal guys

>>67787 Yeah I kind of got sucked into it, now I am slowing a bit down cause I'll burn out if I continue working 12h a day on this, I am also currently giving myself a vacation until next week. In the meantime yes everything is open source, I host it at git.blazebone.com/pochi and when I'll be back I'll come around the irc channel, there is also some doc in the doc folder and it's also hosted on my website, all the info is in the readme. It should compile under Linux, on OpenBSD it will work for sure. I am currently trying to think what direction would be best to take, also thinking about what role it should play in the world of computers, it's desirability etc.. Any person interested is welcome to contribute any way they like, testing and letting me know of bugs, just bouncing ideas/discussions etc... I could even integrate some patches. >>67811 It does, I think it's some kind of umbrella term that means different things for different people, it's like permacomputing. Although for some reason it usually attracts people that seeks to do more (or as much as they can) with less, probably that's the essence of minimalism. I myself think that simplicity is an extremely important aspect of software and that complexity will always ultimately lead to the doom of any software that did not treat complexity with utmost care.