Unique problems of a start-up

Well recently I took the plunge and started my own tech start-up after years of thinking about it. So I have been battling the usual things that many start-ups face I guess.

Of great help are inspirational talks such as these.

First is the talk by creator of Ruby on Rails - David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08 where he talks about how to create a successful start-up.

Next is this talk by Walter Bright where he talks about how he started the programming language D, and he describes the way he works.

My journey has only just started. I would love to discuss some of the issues that start-ups face and how I am trying to solve the ones I face.

I love the new Microsoft!

I have always been a Java person ... until now. With the new cross platform open source CLR (.Net) platform from Microsoft, I am doing exciting new work in C#!

I also love the Linux subsystem on Windows 10 - which I installed today. I was able to build my Lua derived scripting language Ravi using Linux tools right within Windows. I did not enable LLVM but that is next on my list to try. If this really works, then I can decommission my Linux Virtual Machine.

I also love that Microsoft's made the Visual Studio Community edition free - and this is the full version and not a cut-down version. And the new Visual Studio Code editor is great - checkout my Lua/Ravi 5.3 debugger extension for it!

All in all - great stuff, Microsoft!  

Never been as good as now for creating software

When I started building software 25 years ago, one had to pay for everything, even a basic C compiler was not free. There was no internet, no Linux, no OpenSource.

The computing world has really moved on.

Now when one starts a project there is a whole range of OpenSource building blocks one can choose from. And really cool stuff too. In no particular order here are some of the projects that have excited me in recent times:

• CoreCLR
• grpc
• Protocol Buffers
• Apache Zookeeper
• RocksDB
• Lua
• LuaJIT
• Visual Studio Code
• libuv
• node.js
• LLVM

One could go on. The wealth of knowledge that is now accessible to all is tremendous, and it is all there for anyone who is interested. 

I think this is our time - we who create software. The world is being changed forever as software will drive everything everywhere, and we, the software creators, are at the core of this revolution.

From Java to C#

I am using C# for the first time in a major new project. This has been made possible thanks to Microsoft's open sourcing C# and making it cross platform. I am using C# both on the client desktop as well as the server backend.

My initial impression is that as a language C# is much more productive than Java!

If only Microsoft had done this earlier - the programming landscape might have been quite different today. Java still has an advantage of a larger eco-system in the opensource world, especially when it comes to writing server applications. 

Lua Workshop 2015

I presented Ravi at the Lua Workshop 2015 held at Stockholm. You see see the slides of my presentation here.

An LLVM binding for Lua

I announced the development of Ravi back in January 2015. It started as an experiment - I was not certain whether Ravi could achieve the performance levels of LuaJIT, the reigning monarch for Lua JIT compilation.

I am pleased to report that Ravi is able to match LuaJIT's performance for a few selected benchmarks. More details are available here. While this is positive news, there is still much to do to make Ravi competitive in a variety of situations.

LuaJIT offers a powerful FFI interface for interfacing with external libraries and like. This is very convenient for sure, but the approach taken is not compatible with Lua. After some thought I decided that rather than creating an FFI interface for Ravi, a more general capability would be to allow both Lua and Ravi users to write JIT code using LLVM. Work on this has just started so there is not much to show yet, but I hope to make progress fairly quickly.

LLVM is a very low level api - lower level than C. This has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side the LLVM binding will allow Lua and Ravi users to exploit the full power of LLVM. On the minus side even writing trivial functions can be quite some effort.

SimpleDBM migrated to GitHub

As Google decided to shut down the project hosting service I have been forced to find a new home for SimpleDBM. So SimpleDBM is now hosted at the following github site:

https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/simpledbm