Minutes 2026-03-19

Presentation about toad today

• Small CLI program to manage to-do lists
• Built in C, GPLv3
• Written over 2 weeks
• Internally mostly one file
• Gets arguments, processes non-specific commands, loads relevant files, processes specific commands
• Lessons:
  • C string processing isn't very good
    • Generally very annoying
    • Requires lots of extra allocations
    • Concatenation is hell
  • Fun to write C code
    • Simple
    • Small library = low mental overhead
  • Build systems are hard
    • Lots of them
    • Make, CMake, Autotools, etc
  • Not hard to get started in C
    • Already probably have GCC on your system
    • Simple to read and write
    • Few libraries needed for something this small
• Linux/Unix Philosophy
  • Most stuff here is written in C
  • Libraries target C first
  • Small and composable programs are useful