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<title>Articles-rsses on Nine Nines</title>
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<description>Recent content in Articles-rsses on Nine Nines</description>
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<item>
<title>The elephant in the room</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/the-elephant-in-the-room/</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 26 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/the-elephant-in-the-room/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>Have you ever tried telling someone why they should use
Erlang? You boast the smaller code size, the auto healing
mechanisms, the distribution and they seem really excited.
They wonder why they never heard about Erlang before. And
then you show them what the code looks like. All excitement
goes away. The smiles disappear. Their face starts
becoming really serious.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>You lost them. You know you lost them. They comment on the
syntax, or perhaps you do, already admitting defeat. It&#8217;s
unlike anything they have ever used before. And they will
most likely end up not using it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>What about people who already know what the syntax looks
like? As soon as you mention Erlang, the topic of the syntax
comes in. It&#8217;s like nothing else matters.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Perhaps the topic of syntax didn&#8217;t come up. But they&#8217;re
still not going to try Erlang because of it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>You&#8217;re probably not having these kinds of interactions at
Erlang conferences. This doesn&#8217;t happen with people who are
already somewhat interested in, or need, the features that
Erlang provides. With them the syntax is at worst a minor
inconvenience.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This happens because most developers are familiar with
syntaxes that look nothing like Erlang. To be clear, I
include language features and other concepts like objects
as part of "syntax" here. Familiarity is a very important
factor to drive adoption.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>You can see an example of that in the Elixir world, where
the majority of people come from Ruby or already knew and
liked Ruby. The 2016 survey tells us that 59% of Elixir
developers were using Ruby primarily before. That&#8217;s in
large part because of the syntax. They will deny it of
course and find other reasons. And yet, we don&#8217;t see such
a strong adoption of Erlang from Ruby developers, before
or after Elixir appeared.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Side note: have you ever wondered why the Elixir community
is, I quote, much friendlier than the Ruby community?
Despite having much of the same people?</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Before we continue, let me be clear. I love the Erlang
syntax. It is simple and explicit. It is powerful, especially
when dealing with binary data. It has very few quirks.
It has little to no ambiguity. It&#8217;s great. Except for
persuading people to use it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Over the years I have been writing Erlang, I have seen
very few people point out that the syntax slows down
adoption. We have no problem with it, so why would others?
At the same time, people coming to Erlang come to solve
a real problem they&#8217;re having, so the syntax is fairly
secondary. Even if they hate it at first, they know they
can solve their problems despite the syntax.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>You don&#8217;t build a popular product or language by solving
people&#8217;s problems though. In general you end up solving
some problems and creating new problems. No, you build
a popular product by <strong>convincing people to use it</strong>. And
you make them stay with your product by making them
<strong>commit</strong> to using it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Take MongoDB for example. It didn&#8217;t become popular by
working, or even by being practical. It wasn&#8217;t performing
its primary function and was losing people&#8217;s data. That
didn&#8217;t stop it from becoming popular. Smart people would
knowingly use a database that was losing data. Think about
that for a minute.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>MongoDB of course had a huge marketing machine, and they
focused on that. They helped organize many meetups all
over the world, complete with various swag items given
for free, including a small handbook about MongoDB. All
people had to do was show up.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>They didn&#8217;t go tell people to look at all the weaknesses
their product had. They focused on the strengths. On
what would convince people to try it. They would go
to meetups, discuss with others, commit to try it (or
try it at meetups directly), and by doing so sell MongoDB
to themselves.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>How do we get people to meetups though? That&#8217;d be the
first step: you need to <strong>catch their attention</strong>.
I believe MongoDB did this using benchmark results.
Ironic isn&#8217;t it? MongoDB gets fast benchmark results
because they lose data, and this gets everyone to buy
into the product.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The key points to remember about this are:</p></div>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
catch people&#8217;s attention
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
show your product&#8217;s strengths
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
make people take a commitment
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Once they commit to something, you win. Everyone will not
end up ultimately using your product of course, but it&#8217;s
at the very least become a consideration. It&#8217;s on their
mind. Their resolve will be stronger when they ultimately
try it and inevitably run into issues.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Erlang&#8217;s syntax is a weakness. Almost nobody looks at the
Erlang syntax and falls in love with it at first sight.
No, it takes time to learn it and understand how good it
is. You need to sell Erlang to people without showing
the Erlang syntax. If you do show it, then you need to
hide the parts that feel alien. Function calls are OK.
Recursion, not so much. Maps are OK. Records, not.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Avoiding code is not always possible when you try
to sell it, especially to developers. You can however
prepare them to accept the alien syntax by admitting
that the syntax is not perfect before you show it.
You can do this while praising it at the same time.
For example, "the syntax is a little out there, but
it matches the concepts perfectly, it will all make
sense when you start learning".</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This might not be the best introduction. Someone will
need to A/B test it to find the one that gives the
best results. But that should give you ideas.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>When something terrible happens, mentioning that this
isn&#8217;t the end of the world <strong>before</strong> you tell others what
happened will soften their reaction. When someone
breaks your favorite item and cries over it calling
themselves stupid, it&#8217;s harder to get mad at them,
compared to the same event with no emotional reaction.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Our behavior is largely dependent on what&#8217;s at the
top of our mind, so it&#8217;s up to you to take advantage
of this to make your case in the best conditions.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Next time you try to make someone use Erlang, remember
that you should aim for getting a spoken commitment
out of them, if possible before you show the syntax.
If that&#8217;s not possible, then prepare them to accept
the flaws or the weirdness before they see them.</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Don't let it crash</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/dont-let-it-crash/</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/dont-let-it-crash/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>We have a specific mindset when writing Erlang
programs. We focus on the normal execution of the
program and don&#8217;t handle most of the errors that may
occur. We sometimes call this normal execution the
<em>happy path</em>.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The general pattern behind writing only for the
<em>happy path</em>, letting the VM catch errors (writing
them to a log for future consumption) and then
having a supervisor restart the processes that
failed from a clean state, has a name. We call it
<em>let it crash</em>; and it drives many of our design
decisions.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>It&#8217;s a really great way to program and the results
are fantastic compared to most other programming
languages. And yet, <em>let it crash</em> barely convinced
anyone that they should use Erlang. Why would that
be?</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>You may already know that Cowboy is capable of
handling at least 2 million Websocket connections
on a single server. This is in large part thanks
to the capabilities of the VM. Still, 2 million
is good, much better than most other servers can
do.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy is not just a Websocket server; it&#8217;s also
an HTTP and HTTP/2 server, and it handles many
related features like long polling or the parsing
of most request headers.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Can you guess how large the Cowboy codebase is,
without looking at the source?</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Do make sure you have a clear answer in your mind
before you go check.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Good, you are back. Now what were the results? If
I am correct, you overestimated the size of Cowboy.
Cowboy is in fact about five thousand lines of code.
You probably thought it was at least ten thousand.
About eighty percent of readers will have
overestimated the size of Cowboy. And you did only
because I mentioned it can handle millions of
Websocket connections.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Numerous studies show this effect. Just mentioning
the large number already prepared your mind to think
in that direction. Repeating the number made you
focus even more on it. Then the question asked for
a number, which ended up larger than the reality.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The same effect can be applied to negotiation for
example. You generally want to start by giving your
offer (and not let the other party initiate) and
you want to give a really large number first. You
can also prepare your customer by mentioning an even
larger number in the previous discussion.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>And it&#8217;s not just numbers either. An experiment
showed that just by looking at an image of clouds,
customers of a pillow store were buying pillows
more comfortable (and more expensive) than those
who didn&#8217;t see that image.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This is the power of associations. It is covered in
much larger detail in the books
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X">Influence</a>
and
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Pre-Suasion-Revolutionary-Way-Influence-Persuade/dp/1501109790">Pre-suasion</a>.
I highly recommend reading those and applying what
you learn to your daily life. I&#8217;m definitely not
a professional psychologist so take this post with
a grain of salt.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>When selling Erlang, whether we are selling it to
a customer or trying to convince a developer friend
to start using it, we often talk about how Erlang
<em>lets you sleep at night</em>, that it is auto healing
and always gets fantastic uptimes.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>And then we talk about <em>let it crash</em>.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>And we describe what it means.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>We might as well just say that Erlang crashes a lot
and then take the door. It would have the same effect.
It doesn&#8217;t even stop at programs crashing. You know
what else crashes? Cars, planes, trains. Often with
disastrous consequences. Is that really the message
we want to convey?</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>They even <a href="https://img.youtube.com/vi/oEUBW2lCkIk/0.jpg">printed it on a t-shirt</a>!
Keep calm and let it crash. It&#8217;s the kind of t-shirt
you probably shouldn&#8217;t wear in an airport, and for good
reasons. A few people did, then realized what they were
wearing and were not too smug about it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>And yet this is how we sell Erlang.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>A better way would be to focus on the positives, of
course, but also to make sure that those positives
are phrased in a way that prevents bad associations
to be formed in people&#8217;s minds.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Instead of <em>let it crash</em>, you can say that Erlang
has <em>auto healing mechanisms</em>. Healing is a good
thing and accurately describes what happens in the
system.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Should you need to go into more details, you will
probably want to avoid <em>recover from crashes</em> and
instead say <em>recover from exceptions</em>. Exceptions
are a pretty neutral word and, should you explain
what you mean by that, you can talk about exceptions
that occur for reasons unrelated to Erlang, like
hardware failure or network instability.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The trick is to always use positive words and
phrases to describe Erlang, and to use external
factors to explain how Erlang deals with failures.
Never mention the failures internal to Erlang
systems unless you are asked specifically, in
which case you can say that the auto healing
applies to all exceptions.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The <em>let it crash</em> philosophy is great when
learning Erlang or when writing fault-tolerant
systems. But it&#8217;s not going to convince anyone
to use it unless they were already looking for
it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Do you like this post? Tell me on Twitter. I might
make more.</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Cowboy 2.0 pre-release 4</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/cowboy-2.0.0-pre.4/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/cowboy-2.0.0-pre.4/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy <code>2.0.0-pre.4</code> has been released!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This is the new recommended version of Cowboy.
While I would not recommend putting it in production
just yet, I do recommend you start writing new
applications with this Cowboy version.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The most significant changes in the pre-release are:</p></div>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
A new architecture: there now is one process per
connection and one process per request. This was
done because HTTP/2 allows running requests concurrently.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Stream handlers. Every request, response and data goes
through stream handlers. They are meant to replace hooks
and more. They will be documented in a future pre-release.
Check <code>cowboy_stream</code> and <code>cowboy_stream_h</code> if interested.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Numerous changes to the <code>cowboy_req</code> interface. This
is very close to final. Check the manual for what changed.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
The Req object is no longer passed in Websocket callbacks.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
It is now possible to send frames directly from <code>websocket_init/1</code>.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
SPDY support was removed, now that we have HTTP/2.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Update Ranch to 1.3. We still depend on Cowlib master
for the time being.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
A much improved manual.
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The manual received a lot of love. It now has one page per
function with a detailed description, arguments list, return
value, changelog and examples. It also links to the other
relevant manual pages: <a href="https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/manual/">https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/manual/</a></p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I am quite proud of the manual right now. While more
improvements can be made, what we have now is way better
than before. Feedback for further improvements is welcome!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This is a significant step toward Cowboy 2.0. Almost all
the breaking changes are in. A few more pre-releases are
planned and will be released on a weekly basis (with exceptions).</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy is now tested and supported with Erlang/OTP 18.0 or above
on Arch Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, Ubuntu and Windows 7. Contact me
if you can provide permanent access to another platform for the
purposes of testing.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy is now available from four locations:</p></div>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
<a href="https://git.ninenines.eu/cowboy.git">https://git.ninenines.eu/cowboy.git</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="https://github.com/ninenines/cowboy.git">https://github.com/ninenines/cowboy.git</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="https://bitbucket.org/ninenines/cowboy.git">https://bitbucket.org/ninenines/cowboy.git</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="https://gitlab.com/ninenines/cowboy.git">https://gitlab.com/ninenines/cowboy.git</a>
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>They are updated at the same time so there is no real difference.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy 2.0 will be released once all the breaking changes
are completed and the temporarily removed features are
added back.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Thanks for your patience. I know it took a long time.</p></div>
<hr/>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Half-price on all donations because I need a new hat:</p></div>
<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" style="display:inline">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations">
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="[email protected]">
<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="FR">
<input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Loic Hoguin">
<input type="hidden" name="item_number" value="99s">
<input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="EUR">
<input type="hidden" name="bn" value="PP-DonationsBF:btn_donate_LG.gif:NonHosted">
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donate_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
<img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/fr_FR/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
</form>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Ranch 1.3</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/ranch-1.3/</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/ranch-1.3/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>Ranch <code>1.3.0</code> has been released!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This release fixes a number of long standing issues and adds
a small number of features:</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The <code>ssl</code> application has been added to the list of dependencies.
If you don&#8217;t need it, you can remove it automatically when fetching
Ranch or when building the release. If you do need it, you will no
longer have issues shutting down a node because of Ranch.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The <code>ranch:info/0</code> and <code>ranch:procs/2</code> can be used to retrieve
information about Ranch&#8217;s state. Use it for diagnostic and
discovery purposes.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>SSL listeners can now be configured without a certificate, for setups
that make use of the SNI extension.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Transport options are now a blacklist, meaning all unknown options
will be accepted. However Dialyzer will warn if said option is not
defined in Ranch&#8217;s type specifications. Please send a patch when that
happens!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Various bugs have been fixed, including the bug where the
number of active connections could become negative. Common
errors at listener startup should be easier to read (for
example when the port is already in use).</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>See the <a href="https://git.ninenines.eu/ranch.git/plain/CHANGELOG.asciidoc">CHANGELOG</a>
for more details.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Ranch is now tested and supported with Erlang/OTP R16B or above
on Arch Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, Ubuntu and Windows 7. Contact me
if you can provide permanent access to another platform for the
purposes of testing.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Ranch is now available from four locations:</p></div>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
<a href="https://git.ninenines.eu/ranch.git">https://git.ninenines.eu/ranch.git</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="https://github.com/ninenines/ranch.git">https://github.com/ninenines/ranch.git</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="https://bitbucket.org/ninenines/ranch.git">https://bitbucket.org/ninenines/ranch.git</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="https://gitlab.com/ninenines/ranch.git">https://gitlab.com/ninenines/ranch.git</a>
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>They are updated at the same time so there is no real difference.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The most recent Ranch commit is now always signed. You can import the
<a href="https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=vindex&amp;fingerprint=on&amp;exact=on&amp;search=0xF19F189CECC7439699CEDD7A6EF7A77066CCCC8A">signing key for Loïc Hoguin</a> with:</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt>$ gpg --keyserver hkp<span style="color: #990000">:</span>//keys<span style="color: #990000">.</span>gnupg<span style="color: #990000">.</span>net --recv-key 66CCCC8A</tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The primary key fingerprint is <code>F19F 189C ECC7 4396 99CE DD7A 6EF7 A770 66CC CC8A</code>.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>When verifying signatures in git, the following should appear:</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt>gpg<span style="color: #990000">:</span> Signature made Sat <span style="color: #993399">26</span> Nov <span style="color: #993399">2016</span> <span style="color: #993399">12</span><span style="color: #990000">:</span><span style="color: #993399">58</span><span style="color: #990000">:</span><span style="color: #993399">35</span> PM CET
gpg<span style="color: #990000">:</span> using RSA key 71366FF21851DF03
gpg<span style="color: #990000">:</span> Good signature from <span style="color: #FF0000">"Loïc Hoguin &lt;[email protected]&gt;"</span> <span style="color: #990000">[</span>unknown<span style="color: #990000">]</span>
gpg<span style="color: #990000">:</span> WARNING<span style="color: #990000">:</span> This key is not certified with a trusted signature<span style="color: #990000">!</span>
gpg<span style="color: #990000">:</span> There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner<span style="color: #990000">.</span>
Primary key fingerprint<span style="color: #990000">:</span> F19F 189C ECC7 <span style="color: #993399">4396</span> 99CE DD7A 6EF7 A770 66CC CC8A
Subkey fingerprint<span style="color: #990000">:</span> FEDA <span style="color: #993399">6E41</span> B390 F745 A385 5CDC <span style="color: #993399">7136</span> 6FF2 <span style="color: #993399">1851</span> DF03</tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>You can safely ignore the warning if you don&#8217;t know what it
means, as long as everything else is correct.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Mirrors and signature verification will soon be implemented
directly in Erlang.mk. In the meantime, you will need to
set them up manually.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Most of this work was done to fix issues in RabbitMQ. Paid
customers get priority; contact me if you have some issues
that need fixing sooner rather than later.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Expect future releases to be announced in this space.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Thanks for reading!</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Mailing list archived</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/ml-archives/</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/ml-archives/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>The <a href="https://ninenines.eu/archives/extend">old mailing list archives</a> have been
added to the site, mainly for referencing purposes.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The mailing list has been shut down and all personal information
has been deleted.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>If you need help with a project, consider either opening a ticket
on that project&#8217;s issues tracker or going through the community
channels (erlang-questions, #ninenines or #erlang on Freenode).</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Prefer tickets; often when people have issues it highlights an
underlying problem in the project or its documentation.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Thanks.</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Website update</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/website-update/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/website-update/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>Last week-end I updated the Nine Nines website.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I switched to <a href="http://gohugo.io/">Hugo</a>. The site is
now built from <a href="http://asciidoc.org/">Asciidoc</a>
documents. You probably saw me switch to Asciidoc
for documentation this past year. This is the
natural conclusion to that story. The great thing
is that with a little bit of Makefile magic I can
just copy the documentation files into Hugo and
poof, they appear on the website.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I am very happy with that new setup. I can now
post my thoughts again. Woo! Expect regular posts
from now on. I will try to replace my long series
of tweets with posts.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The sections have been rearranged. There used to
be a separate training section; now
<a href="https://ninenines.eu/services">all my services</a> are described in
one page. I have also clarified my areas of
expertise. There used to be confusion in the past,
so now it should be clearer that I am not a
distributed systems expert.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>On that note, if you are looking for my
services right now, I&#8217;m not available. I&#8217;ll have
to work 7 days a week for a while. Try again in a
couple months. More on that in a future post.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The <a href="https://ninenines.eu/docs">documentation</a> becomes a first class
citizen. Bullet and Cowlib don&#8217;t have proper
documentation&#8230; yet. I have started working on the
Cowlib documentation, and Bullet shouldn&#8217;t take too
long. All these projects will be documented when
Cowboy gets to 2.0, and will all be supported
equally. Note that the Cowboy 1.0 documentation
still has the old website templates and links.
Don&#8217;t worry about it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The mailing lists link has been removed. I did
announce a few months back that mailing lists were
going to go. They&#8217;re still up right now, but not
for long. I am planning to put the archives
read-only, link to them from a future post and
be done with it. If you have a question, open a
ticket on Github. Then I can just decide to leave
the ticket open if I want to do improvements based
on your feedback.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I have replaced most of the "we" by "I". I am
a one-man company right now. Have been for a while.
Doesn&#8217;t make sense to keep a facade. I want to be
close to users, not put a barrier between us.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The RSS changed. The old link doesn&#8217;t work anymore.
The new link is at <a href="https://ninenines.eu/index.xml">/index.xml</a>,
or <a href="https://ninenines.eu/articles/index.xml">/articles/index.xml</a>
if you only care about my posts. I guess that&#8217;s the
one most people want.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I still have some tweaks to do, but it will take a
while. My long term plan is to remove Bootstrap, use
vanilla CSS and as little JS as possible. The reason
for that is that it&#8217;s cheaper than upgrading libraries
every few years. Life is too short to spend it
upgrading JS libraries.</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Erlanger Playbook September 2015 Update</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/erlanger-playbook-september-2015-update/</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/erlanger-playbook-september-2015-update/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>An update to The Erlanger Playbook is now available!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The Erlanger Playbook is a book about software development using
Erlang. It currently covers all areas from the conception, design,
the writing of code, documentation and tests.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The book is still a work in progress. Future topics will include
refactoring, debugging and tracing, benchmarking, releases, community
management (for open source projects).</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This update fixes a number of things and adds two chapters: IOlists
and Erlang building blocks.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Learn more about <a href="https://ninenines.eu/articles/erlanger-playbook">The Erlanger Playbook</a>!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This is a self-published ebook. The base price is 50€. All proceeds
will be used to allow me to work on open source full time.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Thank you for helping me helping you help us all!</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Erlanger Playbook</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/erlanger-playbook/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/erlanger-playbook/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>I am proud to announce the pre-release of The Erlanger Playbook.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The Erlanger Playbook is a book about software development using
Erlang. It currently covers all areas from the conception, design,
the writing of code, documentation and tests.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The book is still a work in progress. Future topics will include
refactoring, debugging and tracing, benchmarking, releases, community
management (for open source projects).</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The following sections are currently available:</p></div>
<div class="ulist"><ul>
<li>
<p>
About this book; Future additions
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<em>Workflow:</em> Think; Write; Stay productive
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<em>Documentation:</em> On documentation; Tutorials; User guide; Manual
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<em>Code:</em> Starting a project; Version control; Project structure; Code style; Best practices; Special processes
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<em>Tests:</em> On testing; Success typing analysis; Manual testing; Unit testing; Functional testing
</p>
</li>
</ul></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Read a preview: <a href="https://ninenines.eu/res/erlanger-preview.pdf">Special processes</a></p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The book is currently just shy of 100 pages. The final version
of the book is planned to be between 200 and 250 pages.
A print version of the book will be considered once the final
version gets released. The printed book is <strong>not</strong> included
in the price.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This is a self-published book. The base price is 50€. All proceeds
will be used to allow me to work on open source full time.</p></div>
<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" target="_top">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick">
<input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="9M44HJCGX3GVN">
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_buynowCC_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
<img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/fr_FR/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
</form>
<div class="paragraph"><p>You are more than welcome to pay extra by using this second button.
It allows you to set the price you want. Make sure to set it to at least
50€ to receive the book.</p></div>
<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" target="_top">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_s-xclick">
<input type="hidden" name="hosted_button_id" value="BBW9TR9LBK8C2">
<input type="image" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_buynowCC_LG.gif" border="0" name="submit" alt="PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!">
<img alt="" border="0" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/fr_FR/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1">
</form>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Make sure to provide a valid email address.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>There will be a <strong>delay</strong> between payment and sending of the book.
This process is currently manual.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>As the book is a pre-release, feedback is more than welcome. You can
send your comments to erlanger@ this website.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The plan is to add about 20 pages every month until it is completed.
You will receive updates to the book for free as soon as they are available.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Huge thanks for your interest in buying this book!</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Validating UTF-8 binaries with Erlang</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/erlang-validate-utf8/</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/erlang-validate-utf8/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>Yesterday I pushed Websocket permessage-deflate to
Cowboy master. I also pushed
<a href="https://github.com/ninenines/cowlib/commit/7e4983b70ddf8cedb967e36fba6a600731bdad5d">a
change in the way the code validates UTF-8 data</a>
(required for text and close frames as per the spec).</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>When looking into why the permessage-deflate tests
in autobahntestsuite were taking such a long time, I
found that autobahn is using an adaptation of the
algorithm named <a href="http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de/utf-8/decoder/dfa/">Flexible
and Economical UTF-8 Decoder</a>. This is the C99
implementation:</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt><span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// Copyright (c) 2008-2009 Bjoern Hoehrmann &lt;[email protected]&gt;</span></span>
<span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// See http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de/utf-8/decoder/dfa/ for details.</span></span>
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000080">#define</span></span> UTF8_ACCEPT <span style="color: #993399">0</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000080">#define</span></span> UTF8_REJECT <span style="color: #993399">1</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">static</span></span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">const</span></span> <span style="color: #008080">uint8_t</span> utf8d<span style="color: #990000">[]</span> <span style="color: #990000">=</span> <span style="color: #FF0000">{</span>
<span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// 00..1f</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// 20..3f</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// 40..5f</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// 60..7f</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">9</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// 80..9f</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// a0..bf</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// c0..df</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">0xa</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x4</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// e0..ef</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">0xb</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x6</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x6</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x6</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x5</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// f0..ff</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">0x0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x5</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x8</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x7</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x4</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x6</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0x1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// s0..s0</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">0</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// s1..s2</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// s3..s4</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">2</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// s5..s6</span></span>
<span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">3</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">// s7..s8</span></span>
<span style="color: #FF0000">}</span><span style="color: #990000">;</span>
uint32_t inline
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">decode</span></span><span style="color: #990000">(</span>uint32_t<span style="color: #990000">*</span> state<span style="color: #990000">,</span> uint32_t<span style="color: #990000">*</span> codep<span style="color: #990000">,</span> <span style="color: #008080">uint32_t</span> byte<span style="color: #990000">)</span> <span style="color: #FF0000">{</span>
<span style="color: #008080">uint32_t</span> type <span style="color: #990000">=</span> utf8d<span style="color: #990000">[</span>byte<span style="color: #990000">];</span>
<span style="color: #990000">*</span>codep <span style="color: #990000">=</span> <span style="color: #990000">(*</span>state <span style="color: #990000">!=</span> UTF8_ACCEPT<span style="color: #990000">)</span> <span style="color: #990000">?</span>
<span style="color: #990000">(</span>byte <span style="color: #990000">&amp;</span> <span style="color: #993399">0x3fu</span><span style="color: #990000">)</span> <span style="color: #990000">|</span> <span style="color: #990000">(*</span>codep <span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">6</span><span style="color: #990000">)</span> <span style="color: #990000">:</span>
<span style="color: #990000">(</span><span style="color: #993399">0xff</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span> type<span style="color: #990000">)</span> <span style="color: #990000">&amp;</span> <span style="color: #990000">(</span>byte<span style="color: #990000">);</span>
<span style="color: #990000">*</span>state <span style="color: #990000">=</span> utf8d<span style="color: #990000">[</span><span style="color: #993399">256</span> <span style="color: #990000">+</span> <span style="color: #990000">*</span>state<span style="color: #990000">*</span><span style="color: #993399">16</span> <span style="color: #990000">+</span> type<span style="color: #990000">];</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">return</span></span> <span style="color: #990000">*</span>state<span style="color: #990000">;</span>
<span style="color: #FF0000">}</span></tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>And this is the Erlang implementation I came up with:</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt><span style="font-style: italic"><span style="color: #9A1900">%% This function returns 0 on success, 1 on error, and 2..8 on incomplete data.</span></span>
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #009900">State</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">State</span>;
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">128</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">128</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">128</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">5</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">128</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">7</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">128</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">8</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">128</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">5</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">6</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">7</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">192</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">192</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">4</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">192</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">6</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">192</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">7</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">192</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">194</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">224</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">224</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">4</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">225</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">237</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">237</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">5</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">=:=</span> <span style="color: #993399">238</span>; <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">=:=</span> <span style="color: #993399">239</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">240</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">6</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">=:=</span> <span style="color: #993399">241</span>; <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">=:=</span> <span style="color: #993399">242</span>; <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">=:=</span> <span style="color: #993399">243</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">7</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">244</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">8</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">_</span>, <span style="color: #990000">_</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">1</span><span style="color: #990000">.</span></tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Does it look similar to you? So how did we get there?</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I started with a naive implementation of the original. First, we
don&#8217;t need the codepoint calculated and extracted for our validation
function. We just want to know the data is valid, so we only need to
calculate the next state. Then, the only thing we needed to be careful
about was that tuples are 1-based, and that we need to stop processing
the binary when we get the state 1 or when the binary is empty.</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt><span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #009900">State</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">State</span>;
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">_</span>, <span style="color: #993399">1</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">1</span>;
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #009900">State</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000080">element</span></span>(<span style="color: #993399">257</span> <span style="color: #990000">+</span> <span style="color: #009900">State</span> <span style="color: #990000">*</span> <span style="color: #993399">16</span> <span style="color: #990000">+</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000080">element</span></span>(<span style="color: #993399">1</span> <span style="color: #990000">+</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000080">?UTF8D</span></span>), <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000080">?UTF8D</span></span>))<span style="color: #990000">.</span></tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The macro <code>?UTF8D</code> is the tuple equivalent of the C array
in the original code.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Compared to our previous algorithm, this performed about the same.
In some situations a little faster, in some a little slower. In other words,
not good enough. But because this new algorithm allows us to avoid a binary
concatenation this warranted looking further.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>It was time to step into crazy land.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Erlang is very good at pattern matching, even more so than doing some
arithmetic coupled by fetching elements from a tuple. So I decided I was
going to write all possible clauses for all combinations of <code>C</code>
and <code>State</code>. And by write I mean generate.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>So I opened my Erlang shell, defined the variable <code>D</code> to be
the tuple <code>?UTF8D</code> with its 400 elements, and then ran the
following expression (after a bit of trial and error):</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt><span style="color: #993399">16</span><span style="color: #990000">&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">file:write_file</span></span>(<span style="color: #FF0000">"out.txt"</span>,
[<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">io_lib:format</span></span>(<span style="color: #FF0000">"validate_utf8(&lt;&lt; ~p, Rest/bits &gt;&gt;, ~p) -&gt; ~p;~n"</span>,
[<span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">S</span>, <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000080">element</span></span>(<span style="color: #993399">257</span> <span style="color: #990000">+</span> <span style="color: #009900">S</span> <span style="color: #990000">*</span> <span style="color: #993399">16</span> <span style="color: #990000">+</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000080">element</span></span>(<span style="color: #993399">1</span> <span style="color: #990000">+</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">D</span>), <span style="color: #009900">D</span>)])
|| <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;-</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">lists:seq</span></span>(<span style="color: #993399">0</span>,<span style="color: #993399">255</span>), <span style="color: #009900">S</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;-</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">lists:seq</span></span>(<span style="color: #993399">0</span>,<span style="color: #993399">8</span>)])<span style="color: #990000">.</span>
<span style="color: #FF6600">ok</span></tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The result is a 2304 lines long file, containing 2304 clauses.
People who pay attention to what I say on Twitter will remember
I said something around 3000 clauses, but that was just me not
using the right number of states in my estimate.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>There was a little more work to be done on this generated
code that I did using regular expressions. We need to recurse
when the resulting state is not 1. We also need to stop when
the binary is empty, making it the 2305th clause.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Still, 2305 is a lot. But hey, the code did work, and faster
than the previous implementation too! But hey, perhaps I could
find a way to reduce its size.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Removing all the clauses that return 1 and putting a catch-all
clause at the end instead reduced the number to about 500, and
showed that many clauses were similar:</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt><span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">0</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">1</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">2</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">3</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">4</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">5</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">6</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">7</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);</tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>But also:</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt><span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">157</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">157</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">157</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">5</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">157</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">6</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">157</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">7</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">158</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">158</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">158</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">5</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">158</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">6</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">158</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">7</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);</tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Patterns, my favorites!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>A little more time was spent to edit the 500 or so clauses into
smaller equivalents, testing that performance was not impacted, and
comitting the result.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The patterns above can be found here in the resulting function:</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt><span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">128</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="color: #990000">...</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">0</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">5</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">2</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">6</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Rest</span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #FF6600">bits</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>, <span style="color: #993399">7</span>) <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">when</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&gt;=</span> <span style="color: #993399">144</span>, <span style="color: #009900">C</span> <span style="color: #990000">&lt;</span> <span style="color: #993399">160</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">validate_utf8</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Rest</span>, <span style="color: #993399">3</span>);
<span style="color: #990000">...</span></tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I hope you enjoyed this post.</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>On open source</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/on-open-source/</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/on-open-source/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>Last week I read a great article
<a href="http://videlalvaro.github.io/2014/08/on-contributing-to-opensource.html">on
contributing to open source</a> by Alvaro Videla. He makes
many great points and I am in agreement with most of it.
This made me want to properly explain my point of view with
regard to open source and contributions. Unlike most open
source evangelism articles I will not talk about ideals or
any of that crap, but rather my personal feelings and
experience.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I have been doing open source work for quite some time.
My very first open source project was a graphics driver
for (the very early version of) the PCSX2 emulator. That
was more than ten years ago, and there
<a href="http://ngemu.com/threads/gstaris-0-6.30469/">isn&#8217;t
much left to look at today</a>. This was followed by a
<a href="https://github.com/extend/wee">PHP framework</a>
(started long before Zend Framework was even a thing) and
a few other small projects. None of them really took off.
It&#8217;s alright, that&#8217;s pretty much the fate of most open
source projects. You spend a lot of work and sweat and
get very little in return from others.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This sounds harsh but this is the reality of all open
source projects. If you are thinking of building a project
and releasing it as open source, you should be prepared
for that. This is how most of your projects will feel like.
Don&#8217;t release a project as open source thinking everyone
will pat you on the back and cheer, this won&#8217;t happen. In
fact if your project is a too small improvement over existing
software, what many people will do is say you have NIH
syndrome, regardless of the improvement you bring. So you
need not to rely on other people in order to get your
enjoyment out of building open source software.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>In my case I get enjoyment from thinking about problems
that need solving. Often times the problems are already
solved, but nevermind that, I still think about them and
sometimes come up with something I feel is better and then
write code for it. Writing code is also fun, but not as
fun as using my brain to imagine solutions.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>You don&#8217;t need thousands of users to do that. So are
users worthless to me then? No, of course not. In fact
they are an important component: they bring me problems
that need solving. So users are very important to me.
But that&#8217;s not the only reason.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I got lucky that the Cowboy project became popular.
And seeing it be this popular, and some of my other projects
also do quite well, made me believe I could perhaps work
full time on open source. If I can work full time then
I can produce better software. What I had one hour to
work on before I can now spend a day on, and experiment
until I am satisfied. This is very useful because that
means I can get it almost right from the beginning, and
avoid the million API breaking changes that occured
before Cowboy 1.0 was released.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>To be able to work full time on open source however,
I need money. This is a largely unspoken topic of open
source work. The work is never free. You can download the
product for free, but someone has to pay for the work
itself. Life is unfortunately not free.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Large projects and some lucky people have their work
sponsored by their employers. Everyone else has to deal
with it differently. In my case I was sponsored for a
while by the <a href="http://leo-project.net/leofs/">LeoFS</a>
project, but that ended. I also had the Farwest fundraiser,
which was a success, although the project stalled after that.
(Fear not, as Farwest will make a comeback as a conglomerate
of Web development projects in the future.) After that I set
up the <a href="http://ninenines.eu/support/">sponsoring scheme</a>,
which I can proudly say today brings in enough money to
cover my food and shelter. Great!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This is a start, but it&#8217;s of course not enough. Life
is a little more than food and shelter, and so I am still
looking for sponsors. This is not a very glorious experience,
as I am essentially looking for scraps that companies can
throw away. Still, if a handful more companies were doing
that, not only would I be able to live comfortably, but I
would also be able to stop worrying about the future as I
could put money on the side for when it gets rough.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>A few companies giving me some scrap money so I could
live and work independently is by far the most important
thing anyone can do to help my projects, including Cowboy.
Yes, they&#8217;re even more important than code contributions,
bug reports and feedback. Because this money gives me the
time I need to handle the code contributions, bug reports
and feedback.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>If Cowboy or another project is a large part of your
product or infrastructure, then the best thing you can do
is become a sponsor. The second best is opening tickets
and/or providing feedback. The third best is providing
good code contributions.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I will not expand on the feedback part. Feedback is
very important, and even just a high five or a retweet
is already good feedback. It&#8217;s not very complicated.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I want to expand a little on code contributions
however. Not long ago I ran across the term "patch bomb"
which means dropping patches and expecting the project
maintainers to merge them and maintain them. I receive
a lot of patches, and often have to refuse them. Causes
for refusal vary. Some patches only benefit the people
who submitted them (or a very small number of people).
Some patches are not refined enough to be included.
Others are out of scope of the project. These are some
of the reasons why I refuse patches. Having limited
time and resources, I have to focus my efforts on the
code used by the larger number of users. I have to
prioritize patches from submitters who are reactive
and address the issues pointed out. And I have to plainly
refuse other patches.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I believe this wraps up my thoughts on open source.
Overall I had a great experience, the Erlang community
being nice and understanding of the issues at hand in
general. And if the money problem could be solved soon,
then I would be one of the luckiest and happiest open
source developer on Earth.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Think about it the next time you see a donation button
or a request for funds or sponsoring. You can considerably
improve an open source developer&#8217;s life with very little
of your company&#8217;s money.</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>The story so far</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/the-story-so-far/</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 23 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/the-story-so-far/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>As I am away from home with little to do (some call this
a vacation) I wanted to reflect a little on the story so far,
or how I arrived to Erlang and got to where I am now. The
raw personal experience. It&#8217;ll be an article that&#8217;s more
about social aspect, communities and marketing a project than
technical considerations. As a period piece, it will also
allow me to reflect on the evolution of Erlang in recent
years.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Once upon a time-- Okay this isn&#8217;t a fairy tale. The story
begins with a short chapter in 2010. The year 2010 started
with a fairly major event in my life: the US servers for the
online game I stopped playing a few months before, but was
still involved with through its community, were closing. OMG!
Someone found a way to log packets and started working on a
private server; meanwhile the JP servers were still up. And
that&#8217;s pretty much it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Fast forward a few months and it became pretty clear that
the private server was going nowhere considering all the drama
surrounding it-- which is actually not unusual, but it was
more entertaining than average and the technical abilities of
people running the project were obviously lacking so I decided
to obtain those logged packets and look at things myself. I
didn&#8217;t want to do a private server yet, I only wanted to take
a peek to see how things worked, and perhaps organize some
effort to document the protocol.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>There was 10GB of logs. I didn&#8217;t have an easy to use
language to analyze them, and hex editors wouldn&#8217;t cut it for
most purposes, so I had to look elsewhere. This was a good
opportunity to start learning this PHP killer I read about
before, which also happens to feature syntax for matching
binaries, called Erlang. To be perfectly honest I wouldn&#8217;t
have touched the logs if I didn&#8217;t have the added motivation
to play with and learn a new language.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>At the time it was pretty hard to learn Erlang. In my
experience there was Joe&#8217;s book (which I always recommend
first as I believe it is the best to learn the Erlang side
of things; but falls a little short on OTP), and there was
about 5 chapters of LYSE. There were a couple other books
I never managed to get into (sorry guys), and there was also
a few interesting blogs, some of which I can&#8217;t find anymore.
Finally the #erlang IRC community was there but I was strictly
lurking at the time.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>What a difference compared to 4 years later! (That&#8217;s
today, by the way!) Now we have more books than I can
remember, tons of articles covering various aspects of the
language and platform, many targeting beginners but a good
number of them also about advanced topics. We even have a
free online book, LYSE, with more than 30 chapters covering
pretty much everything. Needless to say I never finished
reading LYSE as it got written slower than I learnt.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Back to 2010. I wrote a parser for the logs, and
aggregated those results into one CSV file per packet type
so I could open them in Gnumeric and aggregate some more,
but manually this time, and draw conclusions on the packet
structures. That was pretty easy. Even for a beginner.
Anyone can go from zero to that level in a day or two.
Then, having mastered binary pattern matching, I wanted
to learn some more Erlang, by making this aggregation
faster. What I had done before worked, but I wasn&#8217;t going
to wait forever to process everything sequentially. So I
looked and found a project called <code>plists</code> (still exists,
but not maintained AFAIK). I downloaded that project and
replaced my <code>lists:</code> calls to <code>plists:</code>.
Boom. In just a few minutes all logs were processed, and
I had learnt something new.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>It is particularly interesting to note that the lack of
a package manager or index never bothered me. Neither before
nor after learning Erlang. My experience with package
managers was mostly related to Ubuntu, a little Perl and
Python, and PHP&#8217;s Pear. Let&#8217;s just stay polite and say it
was always a terrible experience. So searching on the Web
didn&#8217;t feel awkward, because even if I used a tool or
website I would have ended up doing a search or two anyway.
This is in contrast to the package index feature in
<a href="https://github.com/ninenines/erlang.mk">Erlang.mk</a>,
which is meant to simplify specifying dependencies more
than anything: <code>DEPS = cowboy</code>. It does not
attempt to solve any other problem, and will only attempt
to solve one extra problem in the near future, which is
the discovery of packages. So expect some kind of website
listing packages soon enough.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I want to use this parenthese to also point out that at
the time there was a very small number of projects out there,
at least compared to today. While you sometimes hear people
complain about lack of certain libraries, it is so much
better now than it was before! The situation improves very
quickly, so much that it&#8217;s not going to be that big an issue
soon enough.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Wanting to know more about that game&#8217;s protocol, in the
year 2010, I ended up starting to write more Erlang code to
simulate a server and use the server to query the client and
see what was happening, documenting the packets and so on.
This eventually lead to a larger project implementing more
and more until people got their hopes up for a revival of
the game, all the while the now competing original server
project died in a stream of drama and technical incompetence.
Of course, I ended up doing what any good Internet citizen
would do, I crushed people&#8217;s hopes, but that&#8217;s not important
to our story. The important part is that before giving up
on this project, I not only learnt a good deal of Erlang
and a little deal of OTP (which I did not touch until 6
months after I started with Erlang; see the paragraph
about learning material above), but I also had an intriguing
idea pop into my mind for what would become my greatest
success yet.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The giving up part was not easy. Having had financial
difficulties all year 2010 and part of 2009, I resolved
to travel back to Paris to try and make it. I ended up
sleeping in offices for 6 months, being hosted by a shady
person, and hearing my fair share of stories about
the dark side of business. While there I also worked for
another company with someone who would end up becoming
another high profile Erlang developer. The situation
slowly improved, I started taking part in the #erlang
IRC discussions, giving up my status of lurker and, a
few months into 2011, started working on the Apache killer
project: Cowboy.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This is the part where I probably should get accused of
racism and other fun things, but I never did. And I think
that speaks lots about the Erlang community. In all my time
writing Erlang code, I can count the number of conflicts I
had with other people on a single hand. This is the nicest
programming community I have ever seen, by far. And the
humblest too. The Erlang community feels like Japan. And
I love Japan. So I love the Erlang community. I can&#8217;t say
this enough. This is something that stayed true for all
my time using Erlang, and despite the rise of alternative
languages that are not Japan the Erlang community has
remained very Japan.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The first published version of Cowboy was written in
two weeks. A little before those two weeks, during, and
a while after, pretty much everything I said on the
Internets was that Cowboy was going to be the greatest
HTTP server ever, that the other servers were problematic
(and just to be clear, Yaws was rarely if ever mentioned,
due to being in a perceived different league of "full
featured servers" while Cowboy was a "lightweight server"),
and that Cowboy will be the best replacement to a Mochiweb
or Misultin application. This, alongside a lot of time
spent on IRC telling people to use Cowboy when they were
asking for an HTTP server to use, probably made me sound
very annoying. But it worked, and Cowboy started getting
its first users, despite being only a few weeks old. Of
course, as soon as I got my very first user, I started
claiming Cowboy had "a lot of users".</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Looking back today I would definitely find myself annoying,
this wasn&#8217;t just an idle comment there. For about a year,
maybe a little more, all I ever said was that Cowboy was
the best. This probably made me a little dumber in the
process (as if I wasn&#8217;t enough! I know). Being French, I
sometimes would also say things quite abruptly. To stay
polite, I probably sounded like an asshole. I learnt to
stop being so French over time thankfully.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I think what was most important to Cowboy at the time,
was three things. First, it felt fresh. It was new, had new
ideas, tried to do things differently and followed "new" old
best practices (the OTP way-- which was simply too obscure
for most people at the time). Second, it had me spending
all my time telling people to use it whenever they were
looking for an HTTP server. Third, it had me helping people
get started with it and guide them all the steps of the way.
Mostly because it didn&#8217;t have a very good documentation, but
still, hand holding does wonders.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>To be able to help people every time they had a problem,
I did not spend all my days reading IRC. Instead I simply
made sure to be notified when someone said <code>cowboy</code>.
The same way many people subscribe to alerts when their
company is mentioned in the news. Nothing fancy.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Time went on, Cowboy grew, or as some like to say,
completely destroyed the competition, and many people
eventually moved from Mochiweb and Misultin to Cowboy.
And then Roberto Ostinelli stopped Misultin development
and told everyone to move to Cowboy. This is the most
humble and selfless act I have ever seen in the programming
sphere, and I only have one thing to say about it: GG.
Thanks for the fish. He left me with the tasks of improving
Cowboy examples, documentation and strongly believed that
the Misultin interface was more user friendly out of all
the servers. So I added many examples, as many lines of
documentation as we have of code, and strongly believe
that Cowboy 2.0 will be the most user friendly interface
out of all servers. But only time will tell.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>With the rise of the project and the rise in the number
of users, my previous strategy (completely incidental, by
the way, and definitely not a well thought out plan to
become popular) stopped working. It was taking me too much
time. The important aspects slowly drifted. If I wanted to
support more users, I would have to spend less time with
each individual user. This was actually a hard problem.
You basically have to make people understand they can&#8217;t
just come to you directly when they have a problem, they
have to follow proper channels. It becomes less personal,
and might be felt like you don&#8217;t care about them anymore.
You have to hurt some people&#8217;s feelings at this point. It
is quite unfortunate, and also quite difficult to do. There
is some unwritten rule that says early adopters deserve
more, but in the real world it never works like this. So
I probably hurt some people&#8217;s feelings at some point. But
that&#8217;s okay. Because even if you make sure to be as nice
as possible when you tell people to go through proper
channels from now on, some people will still get offended.
There&#8217;s nothing you can do about it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>From that point onward the important points about the
project was getting the documentation done, making sure
people knew about the proper channels to get help and
report issues, etc. Basically making myself less needed.
This is quite a contrast with the first days, but I believe
Cowboy made that transition successfully.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Not only did I win time by not having to hold hands with
everyone all the time (not that I didn&#8217;t like it, but you
know, the sweat), but I also won time thanks to the increased
project popularity. Indeed, the more users you have, the more
annoying guys there are to tell people to use your project
and that it&#8217;s the best and everything. Which is great. At
least, it&#8217;s great if you don&#8217;t pay too much attention to it.
Sometimes people will give an advice that is, in your opinion,
a bad advice. And that&#8217;s okay. Don&#8217;t intervene every time
someone gives a bad advice, learn to let it go. People will
figure it out. You learn by making mistakes, after all. Use
this extra time to make sure other people don&#8217;t end up
giving the same bad advice instead. Fix the code or the
documentation that led to this mistake. Slowly improve the
project and make sure it doesn&#8217;t happen again.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This is my story. So far, anyway.</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Cowboy 2.0 and query strings</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/cowboy2-qs/</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 20 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/cowboy2-qs/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>Now that Cowboy 1.0 is out, I can spend some of my time thinking
about Cowboy 2.0 that will be released soon after Erlang/OTP 18.0.
This entry discusses the proposed changes to query string handling
in Cowboy.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy 2.0 will respond to user wishes by simplifying the interface
of the <code>cowboy_req</code> module. Users want two things: less
juggling with the Req variable, and more maps. Maps is the only
dynamic key/value data structure in Erlang that we can match directly
to extract values, allowing users to greatly simplify their code as
they don&#8217;t need to call functions to do everything anymore.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Query strings are a good candidate for maps. It&#8217;s a list of
key/values, so it&#8217;s pretty obvious we can win a lot by using maps.
However query strings have one difference with maps: they can have
duplicate keys.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>How are we expected to handle duplicate keys? There&#8217;s no standard
behavior. It&#8217;s up to applications. And looking at what is done in
the wild, there&#8217;s no de facto standard either. While some ignore
duplicate keys (keeping the first or the last they find), others
require duplicate keys to end with <code>[]</code> to automatically
put the values in a list, or even worse, languages like PHP even
allow you to do things like <code>key[something][other]</code> and
create a deep structure for it. Finally some allow any key to have
duplicates and just gives you lists of key/values.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy so far had functions to retrieve query string values one
value at a time, and if there were duplicates it would return the
first it finds. It also has a function returning the entire list
with all duplicates, allowing you to filter it to get all of them,
and another function that returns the raw query string.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>What are duplicates used for? Not that many things actually.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>One use of duplicate keys is with HTML forms. It is common practice
to give all related checkboxes the same name so you get a list of
what&#8217;s been checked. When nothing is checked, nothing is sent at all,
the key is not in the list.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Another use of duplicate keys is when generating forms. A good
example of that would be a form that allows uploading any number
of files. When you add a file, client-side code adds another field
to the form. Repeat up to a certain limit.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>And that&#8217;s about it. Of note is that HTML radio elements share
the same name too, but only one key/value is sent, so they are not
relevant here.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Normally this would be the part where I tell you how we solve
this elegantly. But I had doubts. Why? Because there&#8217;s no good
solutions to solving only this particular problem.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I then stopped thinking about duplicate keys for a minute and
started to think about the larger problem.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Query strings are input data. They take a particular form,
and may be sent as part of the URI or as part of the request
body. We have other kinds of input data. We have headers and
cookies and the request body in various forms. We also have
path segments in URIs.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>What do you do with input data? Well you use it to do
something. But there is one thing that you almost always do
(and if you don&#8217;t, you really should): you validate it and
you map it into Erlang terms.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy left the user take care of validation and conversion
into Erlang terms so far. Rather, it left the user take care
of it everywhere except one place. Guess where? That&#8217;s right,
bindings.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>If you define routes with bindings then you have the option
to provide constraints. Constraints can be used to do two things:
validate the data and convert it in a more appropriate term. For
example if you use the <code>int</code> constraint, Cowboy will
make sure the binding is an integer, and will replace the value
with the integer representation so that you can use it directly.
In this particular case it not only routes the URI, but also
validates and converts the bindings directly.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This is very relevant in the case of our duplicate keys,
because if we have a list with duplicates of a key, chances
are we want to convert that into a list of Erlang terms, and
also make sure that all the elements in this list are expected.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The answer to this particular problem is simple. We need a
function that will parse the query string and apply constraints.
But this is not all, there is one other problem to be solved.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The other problem is that for the user some keys are mandatory
and some are optional. Optional keys include the ones that
correspond to HTML checkboxes: if the key for one or more
checkbox is missing from the query string, we still want to
have an empty list in our map so we can easily match. Matching
maps is great, but not so much when values might be missing,
so we have to normalize this data a little.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This problem is solved by allowing a default value. If the
key is missing and a default exists, set it. If no default
exists, then the key was mandatory and we want to crash.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I therefore make a proposal for changing the query string
interface to three functions.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The first function already exists, it is <code>cowboy_req:qs(Req)</code>
and it returns only the query string binary. No more Req returned.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The second function is a renaming of <code>cowboy_req:qs_vals(Req)</code>
to something more explicit: <code>cowboy_req:parse_qs(Req)</code>.
The new name implies that a parsing operation is done. It was implicit
and cached before. It will be explicit and not cached anymore now.
Again, no more Req returned.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The third function is the one I mentioned above. I think
the interface <code>cowboy_req:match_qs(Req, Fields)</code> is
most appropriate. It returns a normalized map that is the same
regardless of optional fields being provided with the request,
allowing for easy matching. It crashes if something went wrong.
Still no Req returned.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I feel that this three function interface provides everything
one would need to comfortably write applications. You can get
low level and get the query string directly; you can get a list
of key/value binaries without any additional processing and do it
on your own; or you can get a processed map that contains Erlang
terms ready to be used.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I strongly believe that by democratizing the constraints to
more than just bindings, but also to query string, cookies and
other key/values in Cowboy, we can allow the developer to quickly
and easily go from HTTP request to Erlang function calls. The
constraints are reusable functions that can serve as guards
against unwanted data, providing convenience in the process.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Your handlers will not look like an endless series of calls
to get and convert the input data, they will instead be just
one call at the beginning followed by the actual application
logic, thanks to constraints and maps.</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt><span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">handle</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Req</span>, <span style="color: #009900">State</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span>
#{<span style="color: #FF6600">name</span><span style="color: #990000">:=</span><span style="color: #009900">Name</span>, <span style="color: #FF6600">email</span><span style="color: #990000">:=</span><span style="color: #009900">Email</span>, <span style="color: #FF6600">choices</span><span style="color: #990000">:=</span><span style="color: #009900">ChoicesList</span>, <span style="color: #FF6600">remember_me</span><span style="color: #990000">:=</span><span style="color: #009900">RememberMe</span>} <span style="color: #990000">=</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">cowboy_req:match_qs</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Req</span>, [
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000080">name</span></span>, {<span style="color: #FF6600">email</span>, <span style="color: #FF6600">email</span>},
{<span style="color: #FF6600">choices</span>, <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">fun</span></span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">check_choices</span></span><span style="color: #990000">/</span><span style="color: #993399">1</span>, []},
{<span style="color: #FF6600">remember_me</span>, <span style="color: #FF6600">boolean</span>, <span style="color: #000080">false</span>}]),
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">save_choices</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Name</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Email</span>, <span style="color: #009900">ChoicesList</span>),
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">if</span></span> <span style="color: #009900">RememberMe</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">create_account</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Name</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Email</span>); <span style="color: #000080">true</span> <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="color: #FF6600">ok</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #0000FF">end</span></span>,
{<span style="color: #FF6600">ok</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Req</span>, <span style="color: #009900">State</span>}<span style="color: #990000">.</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">check_choices</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span><span style="color: #FF0000">"blue"</span><span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> {<span style="color: #000080">true</span>, <span style="color: #FF6600">blue</span>};
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">check_choices</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">&lt;&lt;</span><span style="color: #FF0000">"red"</span><span style="color: #990000">&gt;&gt;</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> {<span style="color: #000080">true</span>, <span style="color: #FF6600">red</span>};
<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">check_choices</span></span>(<span style="color: #990000">_</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span> <span style="color: #000080">false</span>;</tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>(Don&#8217;t look too closely at the structure yet.)</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>As you can see in the above snippet, it becomes really easy
to go from query string to values. You can also use the map
directly as it is guaranteed to only contain the keys you
specified, any extra key is not returned.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>This would I believe be a huge step up as we can now
focus on writing applications instead of translating HTTP
calls. Cowboy can now take care of it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>And to conclude, this also solves our duplicate keys
dilemma, as they now automatically become a list of binaries,
and this list is then checked against constraints that
will fail if they were not expecting a list. And in the
example above, it even converts the values to atoms for
easier manipulation.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>As usual, feedback is more than welcome, and I apologize
for the rocky structure of this post as it contains all the
thoughts that went into this rather than just the conclusion.</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>January 2014 status</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/january-2014-status/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/january-2014-status/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>I will now be regularly writing posts about project status, plans
and hopes for the future.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Before that though, there&#8217;s one important news to share.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Until a year ago all development was financed through consulting
and development services. This worked alright but too much time was
spent doing things that didn&#8217;t benefit the open source projects.
And that didn&#8217;t make me happy at all. Because I like being happy
I stopped that for the most part and spent the year figuring things
out, experimenting and discussing with people about it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>What makes me happy is answering these "what if" questions.
Ranch and Cowboy are a direct product of that, as they originate
from the "what if we could have a server running different protocols
on different ports but all part of the same application?"; Erlang.mk
is a bit different: "this works great for me, what if it could
become the standard solution for building Erlang applications?".</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>When I successfully answer the question, this becomes a project
that may end up largely benefiting the Erlang community. I love
Erlang and I love enabling people to build awesome products based
on my projects. It&#8217;s a lot more rewarding than activities like
consulting where you only help one company at a time. And it&#8217;s
also a much better use of my time as this has a bigger impact on
the community.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The hard part is to figure out how to be able to spend 100%
of the time on projects that you basically give away for free,
and still be able to afford living.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The immediate solution was getting work sponsored by the
<a href="http://www.leofs.org/">LeoFS project</a>. LeoFS is a great
distributed file storage that I can only recommend to anyone who
needs to store files or large pieces of data. The sponsorship
works pretty great, and spurred development of the SPDY code in
Cowboy amongst other things, plus a couple upcoming projects
done more recently and getting a final touch before release.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>It turns out sponsoring works great. So I&#8217;m thinking of
expanding on it and hopefully get enough sponsoring for fulltime
open source development. So I figured out a few things that
can give incentive to companies willing to sponsor.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Sponsors can <em>request that a particular version of Cowboy
be maintained indefinitely</em> (as long as they&#8217;re sponsoring).
This means fixes will be backported. This doesn&#8217;t include
features although I can take requests depending on feasability.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Sponsors can <em>have a direct, private line of communication</em>,
useful when they need help debugging or optimizing their product.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Sponsors can <em>get their name associated with one of the
project</em> and get a good standing in the community thanks
to this. They would be featured in the README of the project
which is viewed by hundreds of developers daily.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Sponsors can <em>be listed on this website</em>. I will modify
the front page when we get a few more sponsors, they will be
featured below the carousel of projects.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Please <a href="mailto:[email protected]">contact us</a> if
you are interested in sponsoring, and say how much you are willing
to sponsor. The goal here is only to have enough money to make a
living and attend a few conferences. There&#8217;s an upper limit in the
amount needed per year, so the more sponsors there are the cheaper
it becomes to everyone.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The upper limit stems from the new legal entity that will replace
the current Nine Nines. This is mostly to lower the legal costs and
simplify the administrative stuff and allow me to dedicate all my
time on what&#8217;s important. From your point of view it&#8217;s business as
usual.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Now on to project statuses and future works.</p></div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_cowboy">Cowboy</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy is getting ready for a 1.0 release. Once multipart support
is in, all that&#8217;s left is finishing the guide, improving tests and
finishing moving code to the cowlib project. I hope everything will
be ready around the time R17B is released.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I already dream of some API breaking changes after 1.0, which
would essentially become 2.0 when they&#8217;re done. An extensive survey
will be setup after the 1.0 release to get more information on what
people like and don&#8217;t like about the API.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>And of course, when clients start implementing HTTP/2.0 then we
will too.</p></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_ranch">Ranch</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>Ranch is also getting close to 1.0. I am currently writing a
test suite for upgrades. After that I also would like to write
a chaos_monkey test suite and add a getting started chapter to the
guide.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Ranch is pretty solid otherwise, it&#8217;s hard to foresee new
features at this point.</p></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_erlang_mk">Erlang.mk</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>I didn&#8217;t expect this project to become popular. Glad it did though.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Windows support is planned, but will require GNU Make 4.
Thankfully, it&#8217;s available at least through cygwin. Make,
Git and Erlang will be the only required dependencies
because the rest of the external calls will be converted to
using Guile, a Scheme included since GNU Make 4. So it is
Guile that will download the needed files, magically fill
the list of modules in the <em>.app</em> file and so on, allowing
us to provide a truly cross-platform solution without
losing on the performance we benefit from using Make.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Also note that it is possible to check whether Guile
is available so we will be able to fallback to the current
code for older systems.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I am also thinking about adding an extra column to the package
index, indicating the preferred tag or commit number to be used.
This would allow us to skip the individual <code>dep</code> lines
entirely if the information in the package index is good enough.
And committing that file to your project would be the only thing
needed to lock the dependencies. Of course if a <code>dep</code>
line is specified this would instead override the file.</p></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_alien_shaman">Alien Shaman</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>This is the two-parts project requested by the LeoFS team.
This is essentially a "distributed bigwig". I am hoping to
have a prototype up in a few days.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Alien is the part that allows writing and enabling probes
in your nodes. Probes send events which may get filtered before
being forwarded to their destination. The events may be sent
to a local process, a remote process, over UDP, TCP or SSL.
Events may also be received by a process called a relay, which
may be used to group or aggregate data before it is being sent
over the network, reducing the footprint overall.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Shaman is the UI for it. It will ultimately be able to display
any event as long as it&#8217;s configured to do so. Events may be logs,
numeric values displayed on graphs updated in real time, lists of
items like processes and so on.</p></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_feedback">Feedback</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>That&#8217;s it for today! There will be another status update once
Shaman is out. But for now I have to focus on it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>As always, please send feedback on the projects, this post,
the sponsoring idea, anything really! Thanks.</p></div>
</div>
</div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Farwest got funded!</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/farwest-funded/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 27 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/farwest-funded/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>This was a triumph! I&#8217;m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS!!</p></div>
<iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no" height="400px" width"236px" seamless="seamless" src="https://api.bountysource.com/user/fundraisers/83/embed"></iframe>
<div class="paragraph"><p>It&#8217;s hard to overstate my satisfaction. Thanks to everyone who
made this possible.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>If you have backed this fundraiser, and haven&#8217;t provided your
personal details yet, please do so quickly so that your rewards
can be sent!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>I am hoping that we will be able to make good use of all that
money. The details of the expenses will be published regularly
on the <a href="https://github.com/extend/farwest/wiki/2013-Fundraiser">2013 Fundraiser wiki page</a>,
giving you full disclosure as to how your money is used.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>It will take a little time to get things started, we are in
summer after all! We will however act quickly to make the
prototype easy enough to use so that the paid UI work can
begin. This is also when user contributions will be welcome.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>You can see the <a href="https://github.com/extend/farwest/wiki/Roadmap">Roadmap</a>
to get more information on the current plans. This document will
get updated as time goes on so check again later to see if you
can help!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Look at me: still talking when there&#8217;s open source to do!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Thanks again for all your support. I really appreciate it.</p></div>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Build Erlang releases with Erlang.mk and Relx</title>
<link>https://ninenines.eu/articles/erlang.mk-and-relx/</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 28 May 2013 00:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
<guid>https://ninenines.eu/articles/erlang.mk-and-relx/</guid>
<description><div class="paragraph"><p>Building OTP releases has always been a difficult task. Tools like
Reltool or Rebar have made this simpler, but
it&#8217;s no panacea. This article will show you an alternative and
hopefully much simpler solution.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>There is two steps to building a release. First you need to build
the various OTP applications you want to include in the release. Once
done, you need to create the release itself, by including the Erlang
runtime system alongside the applications, a boot script to start the
node and all its applications, and some configuration files.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p><a href="https://github.com/extend/erlang.mk">Erlang.mk</a> solves
the first step. It is an include file for GNU Make. Just
including it in a Makefile is enough to allow building your project,
fetching and building dependencies, building documentation, performing
static analysis and more.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p><a href="https://github.com/erlware/relx">Relx</a> solves the second
step. It is a release creation tool, wrapped into a single executable
file. It doesn&#8217;t require a configuration file. And if you do need one,
it will be a pretty small one.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Let&#8217;s take a look at the smallest Erlang.mk powered
Makefile. There is only one thing required: defining the project
name.</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Simply doing this allows you to build your application by typing
<code>make</code>, running tests using <code>make tests</code>, and
more. It will even compile your <em>.dtl</em> files found in the
<em>templates/</em> directory if you are using ErlyDTL!</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Let&#8217;s now take a look at a simplified version of the Makefile for
this website. I only removed a few targets that were off-topic.</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>You can see here how to define dependencies. First you list all
the dependency names, then you have one line per dependency, giving
the repository URL and the commit number, tag or branch you want.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Then you can see two targets defined, with <code>release</code>
becoming the default target, because it was defined first. You can
override the default target <code>all</code>, which builds the
application and its dependencies, this way.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>And as you can see, the <code>release</code> target uses
Relx to build a release into the <em>rel/ninenines/</em>
directory. Let&#8217;s take a look at the configuration file for this release.</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt>{<span style="color: #FF6600">release</span>, {<span style="color: #FF6600">ninenines</span>, <span style="color: #FF0000">"1"</span>}, [<span style="color: #FF6600">ninenines</span>]}<span style="color: #990000">.</span>
{<span style="color: #FF6600">extended_start_script</span>, <span style="color: #000080">true</span>}<span style="color: #990000">.</span>
{<span style="color: #FF6600">sys_config</span>, <span style="color: #FF0000">"rel/sys.config"</span>}<span style="color: #990000">.</span>
{<span style="color: #FF6600">overlay</span>, [
{<span style="color: #FF6600">mkdir</span>, <span style="color: #FF0000">"log"</span>},
{<span style="color: #FF6600">copy</span>, <span style="color: #FF0000">"rel/vm.args"</span>,
<span style="color: #FF0000">"releases/\{\{release_name\}\}-\{\{release_version\}\}/vm.args"</span>}
]}<span style="color: #990000">.</span></tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The first line defines a release named <code>ninenines</code>, which
has a version number <code>"1"</code> and includes one application, also
named <code>ninenines</code>, although it doesn&#8217;t have to.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>We then use the <code>extended_start_script</code> option to tell
Relx that we would like to have a start script that allows
us to not only start the release, but do so with the node in the
background, or also to allow us to connect to a running node, and so on.
This start script has the same features as the one tools like
Rebar generates.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The rest of the file just makes sure our configuration files are
where we expect them. Relx will automatically take care
of your <em>sys.config</em> file as long as you tell it where to
find it. The <em>vm.args</em> file used by the extended start script
needs to be handled more explicitly by using an overlay however.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>How does Relx find what applications to include?
By looking at the application dependencies in the <em>.app</em>
file of each OTP application. Make sure you put all dependencies in
there, <em>including</em> library applications, and Relx
will find everything for you.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>For example, this release includes the following applications.
Only what&#8217;s strictly required.</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre><code>compiler-4.9.1 crypto-2.3 kernel-2.16.1 ranch-0.8.3 syntax_tools-1.6.11
cowboy-0.8.5 erlydtl-0.7.0 ninenines-0.2.0 stdlib-1.19.1</code></pre>
</div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>The <em>sys.config</em> file is standard and
<a href="http://www.erlang.org/doc/man/config.html">well documented</a>.
The <em>vm.args</em> file is just an optionally multiline file
containing all the flags to pass to the Erlang VM, for example
<code>-name [email protected] -heart</code>.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Building OTP releases has always been a difficult task. Until now.</p></div>
</description>
</item>
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