My Coding Cult

Hello bois, I added more updates to the Eden Platform https://github.com/cultleader777/EdenPlatform/commit/f2121ba0b8fdb541e6aacc62651acdd8724c0235

Now you can add custom secrets to the secrets.yml and also use those secrets in blackbox deployments.

Another thing I added is support for custom MX/TXT/CNAME records served by our DNS servers, I needed those because I don't have self hosted email yet so for now I'll rely on third party providers. People usually need those for domain verifications and so on.

I did quite a few bug fixes, but I already forgot what specifically.

Seems like I have over half million views on some posts, although when I upgraded SMF in this forum (not because I wanted, hosting provider broke some php function with php version upgrade and forum was offline) online counter broke down, which I'm not interested in spending time to fix.

Getting that many post views I'm glad that calling most leftist software engineers a bunch of faggots finally paid off. Feel free to register for the third user in this forum, bunch of lurkers, lol.

Have a good day bois.

Hello bois, I keep adding features to the Eden platform, things are breaky in the beginning
https://github.com/cultleader777/EdenPlatform/commit/c2d048609fb697ff43b7ac2a0e7e4db9051eac04

Breaking change:
1. tld was removed from region
2. in global settings you must pick the tld to use for internal DNS names
3. tld table has expose_admin field removed because global settings tld exposes admin, things are simpler this way

I added:
- custom environment variables or secrets to the blackbox deployments. This is needed if you, say, want to host database in Eden platform, and you need to expose private environment variable to PostgreSQL from app that users the database, you can do so now
- support for multiple TLDs, you can host as many domains as you want. This was intended to be supported from beginning but of course, there are issues before you actually test it, now it works
- ingresses for blackbox deployments, basically, you can expose blackbox service like wordpress blog or self hosted Jira under any subdomain and host it under eden platform
- you can disable dnssec for tld if the provider you bought domain from doesn't support dnssec

Some fields might seem like ad hoc, like basic_auth file field in blackbox ingress, but that is because I'm deploying features I'm now actually using in my businesses. Inevitably, if someone wants to use Eden platform they'll have to get their hands dirty because I don't think anytime soon I'll start writing thorough documentation, although we already have 777 tests.

Peace bois.

Hello bois.

I started building out my products with EdenPlatform on top of AWS. I started with only 4 servers, two datacenters for quorum, modest 8GB machines while having beefy bare metals at local DC.

It started out with 1000$ per month, which is already unbelievable as any decent VPS provider would provide such hardware at laughable ~15$ per box, which would be 60 dollars total. But whatever, as long as I could get EdenPlatform working with multiple datacenters, including AWS I figured its a proof of concept that you can easily connect expensive AWS cloud to other clouds or datacenters.

The cost was starting to run at unbelievable 2000$ per month for four servers. Some AWS fag would scream "visit cost explorer, yoo moost bee doin sumthin wraaang!".

Yes, I was doing something wrong - entrust my businesses with AWS in the first place. I will not bother with cost explorer and complex AWS pricing rules - thank you.

So, I added hetzner bare metal server implementation to Eden platform, took a week. https://github.com/cultleader777/EdenPlatform/commit/6da40c742c118454310d66d8402d20789e566597

Then, once I got it fully working inside Eden platform, it took me a day to migrate all of my infrastructure from AWS to Hetzner machines for which I'm paying laughable 200 dollars per month for all machines.

I migrated:
- Nomad servers
- Consul servers
- Vault servers
- Victoria metrics servers
- Alertmanager servers
- Minio servers
- Postgres servers
- Clickhouse keeper servers - the only one that involved manual action of reconfiguring peers

And I said goodbye to AWS overpriced garbage VMs by running terraform destroy with a perfectly satisfied smiling face.

Mind you, these machines have twice the cores and 8 times more RAM than AWS pile of garbage small machines have. They perform much better and are always snappy, not at the modest RAM limit barelly chugging like they were in AWS.

So, in my case, price reduction for hardware as not just 90%, I got a lot more powerful and cheap machines and I still have all the properties of Eden Patform, cost ratio is more like hundred times more expensive in AWS.

And AWS faggots will start screaming "but your database is not scalable, your queues are not scalable, your storage is not scalable!"

First and foremost, if you use RDS instance in AWS it is not scalable either. If RDS instance breaks down due to traffic, guess who needs to resize it? You. If kafka instance is no longer handling the load, who needs to resize it? You. If ElasticCache instance is too small, who needs to resize it? You. Who needs to setup prometheus exporters to these services? You.

There are very few AWS services that scale out of the box, like S3 and SQS, but cost of running any server in AWS is laughable. And if you use something like DynamoDB, where you're literally raped for every single request, if your traffic bursts you'll never get better price proposition than if you ran bare metal Postgres instance to begin with.

And guess what? Since I have OCaml programming language that generates EdenPlatform code I could easily code OCaml functions that could burst up compute from any cloud at any time with regarding metrics. This is not just some basic autoscaling like kubernetes, I can write OCaml code spin up entire datacenters and terraform code will be generated and backend application scaled to only compute machines. I have all the power in my hands to do any autoscaling strategy I want with EdenPlatform, even querying moon phases during compile time.

In the context of EdenPlatform, clouds like AWS or Google cloud are legacy systems. Temporary stops. You already have managed highly available Postgres with Patroni, you already have S3 (MinIO), you already have Kafka (self hosted NATS), you already have Analytics database (Clickhouse), you already have DNS (Bind), you already have redundant links across datacenters (Wireguard + BGP routing) and everything is set up in highly available fashion, any server can go down and I'm still happily chugging along. Not to mention everything is using rock solid NixOS to have reproducible state on all machines where you can rest assured operating system will be running a long time without any problems.

In 10 years time Cloud will be looked into as the biggest fraud in the history of computing. Maybe AI will be the first and cloud second, both are unbelievable frauds. Startups that serve 10 requests per second spend 100k on AWS while they could be serving the same for under a thousand dollars on normal hosting (if they also adjusted their mindsets to never run garbage of NodeJS and to run Rust programs instead). Today's DevOps practices will be looking like a clown show 10 years from now, when most hosted services will be run in self hosted manner and where compiler like Eden Platform will check 99% of mistakes for you and deployments will work the first time.

Dear AWS, I always hated you. You were overpriced, useless garbage from day one. And people who praise you are mindless imbeciles. Goodbye, and I hope I'll never see you again.

Good day bois

Hello boys, the time is ripe to release initial early version of Eden Plafrom.

I don't have 7 clouds, I have two out of 7, AWS and Google Cloud because most people use AWS anyway.

It's been a while, and after 72k lines of Rust implementation code I'm finally running in production and shipping features.

Things are still very early, things are breaky, there's very little documentation. Although, if anyone wants to figure out how it works there are plenty of tests of every feature.

So, let's list things that work:
- Backend apps
- Frontend apps (not well tested yet)
- Postgres queries/mutators/transactions
- Clickhouse queries/inserters/mutators
- Nats queues
- Tracing with grafana tempo
- Log collection with grafana loki
- Alerting with prometheus
- Hashicorp Consul
- Hashicorp Nomad
- Hashicorp Vault
- Automatic TLS certs with certbot
- Automatic wireguard VPN across datacenters
- Exposing backend app to any DNS record via a load balancer

So far as I'm building apps I need to touch Eden platform less and less. The same happened with Eden DB compiler, last major feature I added to EdenDB compiler was OCaml data modules and I don't remember last time I needed to touch it. The same slowly but surely is happening with Eden platform, the more and more I work the more I work on my applications and less and less I need to touch Eden platform.

I can already serve any html imaginable for the users so I can implement most of the websites out there. However I think the current most major features missing are self hosted email. I also want to add FoundationDB next year just to have one fast and reliable key value store in those very rare cases where you need one.

I don't plan to spend too much time on documentation, if you want to figure out behavior of certain table or feature, read `wiki` directory and also read tests on how all the features work, there are over 750 cargo tests in initial release as I usually try to thoroughly test every new feature.

So, from now on I'll keep building applications (which I'll never open source) on top of Eden platform and Eden platform only needs to keep maturing at this point.

Have a good day bois

Sup bois, I've added extremely powerful feature into EdenDB: OCaml data modules. What this allows to do is to define data in OCaml using typesafe generated constructs.

I did this a while ago in this commit https://github.com/cultleader777/EdenDB/commit/9270c3e42ab28410e8ba3018f76b4eea0b586da4 , just didn't get around to describing it yet until now.

Motivation? Eden data language is fast to parse but will never be as powerful as standard typesafe programming language.

For instance, if I want to define 10 similar nodes in a cloud, doing it with OCaml is trivial, run a loop and you're done.

People write an utter abominations like jsonnet, or they add hacks like count variable in terraform or for_each in terraform.

In reality we just need a good programming language to define our data and we don't need to learn useless garbage like jsonnet, or how to program in terraform (which is nightmare). Terraform output is just an assembly compiler later, we don't deal with it directly.

Here's an example.

Say, we have main.edl file


DATA MODULE OCAML "some-module"

TABLE test_table {
    id INT PRIMARY KEY,
    some_text TEXT DEFAULT 'hello',
}

And we have OCaml file at some-module/bin/implementation.ml

open! Context
open! Db_types

let define_data () =
  mk_test_table ~id:123 () |> def_test_table;
  mk_test_table ~id:123 ~some_text:"overriden" () |> def_test_table;
  ()


So OCaml allows us to define table data in OCaml. We didn't write mk_test_table function (generated). define_data function is required in the generated code. There's a some_text column that has default value if unspecified. If your OCaml file implementation mismatches schema it's a compile time error.

To someone who's used to the standard implementation of compilers that do very boring stuff, linking executables from explicit outputs this might not be trivial how it works. In fact, I don't recall any compilers that do anything similar to what is done here. If codegen step is performed, it is usually performed in some Makefile task before compilation.

So, this is how it works:
1. EdenDB compiler parses all .edl sources with includes
2. We first process table schema and their interconnections, any error there (non existing foreign key column and etc.) is EdenDB compiler error
3. Now we know all the schema that will be in EdenDB, we just didn't insert any data yet and didn't check foreign keys, constraints and etc.
4. At this point we actually run OCaml codegen for the OCaml data module defined at some-module.
   We generate: dune, dune-projec, context.ml, context.mli, db_types.ml, implementation.mli, main.ml and dummy implementation.ml if it doesn't exist yet.
   User is responsible for modifying implementation.ml file with his data, he can have other OCaml files with utility functions and everything.
   We assume that we use dune for OCaml.
5. Now we insert the EdenDB data that is defined in EDL
6. At this point, EdenDB compiler runs dune exec for data modules, reads json dump of defined data, and inserts data into EdenDB state according to the schemas
7. The rest of EdenDB checks are performed, like checking duplicate primary keys, foreign key existance on all of the data, whether it is defined in EDL, Lua or OCaml

I haven't seen any compiler do something like that so I thought it is interesting design. And I'm 99% sure, being 70k lines of code into Eden platform that this is how I will define my data at the end of the day.

So, Current eden platform pipeline:
1. Run EdenDB compiler, which runs OCaml data modules and defines data of all of our infrastructure. Basic database correctness checks are performed here
2. Eden platform analysis step, here we perform all the checks regarding our infrastructure, say if defined node ip belongs to the DC subnet, that we have 3 or 5 consul servers per DC and so on
3. Codegen step runs which compiles the rest of our project, including provisioning, postgresql migrations, nix configs, and gazillion of other stuff. There are files that user can edit manually in Eden platform in their project directory (mainly business logic of EdenDB applications).

Have a good day bois!

Working on Eden platform (at this point I have AWS and Google cloud talking together, and I did bunch of internal refactorings, NixOS root on zfs and etc. anyway, 5 more clouds to go until release), I thought, could ChatGPT ever be productive enough in maintaining infrastructure? Not that I haven't heard of it, I'm user of ChatGPT it as everyone else, but when I had actual problems in infra, I even tried giving it as much context as I could and it was next to useless.

In linux when running virtual machines, by default iptable rules apply to the vm guests, which should be disabled if you want your sanity. I've been debugging this for a day, and asked ChatGPT to guide me, with logs all server topolgy and contexts. For crying out loud, I've even pasted in the culprit - the ipables rules which were blocking the traffic and it didn't suggest me that iptable rules were at fault.

When I think about it, programming is extremely precise. Having never used FRRouting before to implement routing for Eden platform it was quite a pain to get networking working across clouds. For google faggity cloud I've spent a lot of time debugging why in the world L2 frame doesn't travel between the hosts only to find out google implements its own faggity andromeda abomination network which doesn't even support L2 traffic. Meaning, in google cloud you have to rely on their slow router garbage which can never be adjusted realtime in terraform and they suggest your to run your own bgp node to interact with their faggity router! All because they don't do L2 traffic. I cannot spend bunch of time dealing with faggotry of google cloud so I simply enapsulated traffic between eden platform datacenters (which could be any datacenter implementation) in IP GRE protocol so it would fly as L3 traffic.

I will not treat any cloud specially and use their special faggotry nonsense just to make nodes across clouds talk when I have public ips in every cloud, so I should be able to implement my own routing, no? Google cloud faggots...

So, anyway, when doing this complex networking, usually, a single configuration misfire and traffic is gone. There's no leeway for error. I even had to redo networking, abstract it to have attributes for datacenters and I had to write configuration simulation in tests so now that I have got to a working state I could freeze the configuration to know for a fact I didn't break anything.

Maybe I just like the pain, but I can't wait until the day emerges where all of the issues I've been dealing with simply become compile time errors in high level Eden platform data and I don't have to deal with such low level details and can focus on finally shipping suite of applications I want to build on top of Eden platform.

ChatGPT, even given all of the context, if it makes mistakes in single place things don't work. And every time I used it to generate even skeleton terraform configs I always have to run it and debug. There was not a single time where I pasted code from ChatGPT and it would just work, except for simple queries like write lua function that sums 1 to 10. Apart from these toy examples AI is next to useless.

So the only use for AI seems to be when you need to write a polite email, generate a picture, rewrite some sentences - anywhere where precision is not important. In software engineering precision is crucial.

Let me ask you one thing, would anyone use a library that does a memory leak one in a million times? No, it would be dismissed as garbage. You have to rigorously test it to make it usable in real world in production.

Some indian faggot said with a smug face "there are no programmers in 5 years". Sure, I guess there will appear a batch of people blindly copy pasting things from ChatGPT and they'll eventually still need a programmer to fix/debug the mess which they have made.

AI coding monkeys think from a very narrow short perspective. For some reason, AI fags cannot imagine producing programs any other way than there are gazillion repositories with different programming languages and you MUST parse and process all of that context before you can contribute. Someone is doing JavaScript with NodeJS? Parse and analyze that faggotry! Someone is doing Ruby, their app is full of bugs? Parse and analyze this faggotry too!

What I do with Eden platform is radically different. I'm looking down like I mentioned in another post. My data is defined in tables and columns. All columns are sequential in column store provided by EdenDB so analyzing data is blazing fast and can be parallelized to all cores. All applications are in Rust (I'll add OCaml if there is ever NATS support added, or I might expose Rust C library for OCaml to talk with NATS). So, in Eden platform you just add high level data, it is all compiled and analyzed and every application interacts correctly from day one. There is no longer need for NodeJS faggots or ChatGPT. To tell you whats wrong or to write many tedious tests. Currently, when writing app in Eden platform literally 900 lines of Rust get generated and I write 100 remaining which interact in typesafe manner with the rest of the ecosystem, making me literally 10x developer. I don't fear to interact with database/queues or other apps even without tests.

That is much more useful than some garbage generated by ChatGPT which may or may not work (usually didn't work for me). I want things to work the first time, with compile time errors knowing everything will work. I'm not interested in some probabilistic vomit I need to debug again and again and again.

Even if I'd let ChatGPT to write documentation I need to proof read it again anyway, but hey, at least it sticks to word vomit now!

Now, I still believe Eden platform will drastically reduce engineering power needed, but it will not be by producing random vomit that doesn't work - it will be code generation and compile time errors before shipping to production. That will be the big firing of Ruby and JavaScript monkeys, not ChatGPT.

Have a good day bois!

Today I want to talk about pain that a lot of engineers cause to themselves.

I will tell you right now - no company at a high level gives a tinyest crap about implementation details of any component you create. Someone might say I'm saying that the sky is blue. Apparently not, because the world is infested with yaml abominations and NodeJS.

Let's pick example, there are two NodeJS services. There's a mismatch in how one service calls another and its an error. It turns into a Jira ticket.

Project manager asks what's wrong with that? Engineer says "well, one NodeJS service doesn't know schema of other service, we need to run tests". Poor project manager has to nod head and say "ok ok".

This is bullshit excuse. Your system, oh fellow engineer, who you came up with of hundreds of NodeJS microservices is an abomination and you should feel bad. You're an idiot and it is your fault. When you think about it, if both services were in same executable, in Rust, it would be just compile time error and you'd have to fix it to ship. When services are separated, the exact same error for some reason becomes okay now!

Anytime such excuse comes to light "we can't verify kubernetes deployment yaml hence it errors out know because our helm chart repo is abominable pile of yamls that doesn't work together" its the fault of idiot engineers.

Anything that gets in the way of the high level goals of adding features to make your customers happy is the fault of the engineers. You picked Ruby on Rails garbage and now suffer many production runtime errors because of that? Its your fault. Your system is a repository of crappy incoherent yamls that have no typesafe enforcement so you resort to test environments to catch such errors? It is your fault. You can't deploy new database in 5 minutes with HA, replication and backups and it doesn't interact with your app in a typesafe manner? It is your fault.

Pagan monkeys have this funny idea that every system should be open and you should be allowed to put anything in it, like dynamic type schema registration, dynamic execution hooks or whatever. "Great software is not built, it is grown!". Imbeciles. They're saying that because their mom was an open system, open to 100 different guys that is, and look at them now.

What I do with Eden platform is radically different. There are no incoherent yamls, there's a single source of truth database which can be defined in eden data language or lua (probably also with webassembly in the future if there's need). I already implemented AWS terraform code generation, which uses AWS transit gateway if you have more than one datacenter in AWS, but uses wireguard to connect to all other clouds. I'll implement 6 more clouds for the initial version and they'll all talk together via wireguard VPN with high availability and OSPF routing since day one (you can't deploy half-assed no production ready configurations in Eden platform).

You see, since I said from the very beginning, if something doesn't work in production in Eden platform its my fault as an engineer. It is much more difficult to catch all errors during compile time than just leave users swearing and sweating in production due to runtime errors caused by incorrect configurations. Now I have no excuse like today's yaml fags. So I can actually solve these problems by analyzing data in eden platform compiler which tells me within second if my data is wrong. It tells me instantly with compile time error, that I deployed all DB instances only in single datacenter, which should be scattered around datacenters in region to tolerate DC loss. It tells me instantly if query application is using is no longer correct because schema changed. It tells me instantly if one frontend app link no longer can reach other frontend app page during compilation.

So all of these just become compile time errors. So guess what happens with feature velocity? Since all of the previous excuses become compile time errors there's no reason why you couldn't implement REST call to another service in 5 minutes - compiler tells you instantly schema is changed or is incorrect because we took responsibility. Compiler will tell us instantly if prometheus alert is using non existing series. Compiler tells us instantly that we forgot to configure virtual router IP in certain datacenters and clouds where it is needed.

What an old experienced SRE had to do himself by knowing of the system now compiler tells us to do simply it has all the information together.

So what should you do for the rest of the time once you're using Eden platform (hope to release initial version next year finally)? You just develop features and everything works together from day one. And you can do work of 100 engineers alone now. I'm very excited to release this project next year as no one ever done this and it will radically change the way things are done now. Most yaml masturbating excuse engineers - you're likely to get fired soon.

Have a good day bois!

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. - Isaiah 55:8-9
And he said unto them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world. - John 8:23
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. - Revelation 1:8

Let's talk about two directions software is developed in this world. Say, you develop an open source library. You're in for the world of hurt. How many different people in different contexts would try to use your library? Some idiot in golang book (yes, I've read a golang book just to hear them out, that reassured me even more that golang is trash and one day I might write dedicated post roasting golang) claims that if you want to make useful software it has to be generic. There is that evil word again.

The truth of the matter is if you make stuff generic your things are inherently limited. You are looking up. Looking up means like looking up to the sky, whether it will rain or not, you don't control that. The people that use your library are the ones from the higher context, in a specific organization looking down into your library whether it is usable in this context or not. Long story short, users of your library have all context to use it so they have much easier time to decide what to do. They don't have to use your library, for specific case they could develop their own custom component.

As soon as you put yourself into context of what you want to achieve you start looking down. You have full control of your project. Well, I guess someone could say that as I'm developing Eden platform (I'm roughly 60% there I think, developing infrastructure tool that has cloud/provisioning/versioning/logging/monitoring/ci/cd/security/applications/load balancing/databases/queues and etc. integrated together is quite a lot of work, believe me) I am imagining all the context.

In Eden platform everything is assumed, private ip scheme is assumed. Routing amongst subnets is assumed. I assume datacenters will have certain ip prefixes, like 10.17.0.0/16 for one datacenter and 10.18.0.0/16 for another datacenter. Hence the routing is simple. I assume datacenter can have up to 65k hosts, all inside /24 subnets inside datacenter like 10.17.1.0/24 for one subnet and 10.17.2.0/24 for another. I assume every datacenter has at least two wireguard gateways to connect to all other datacenters which is checked at compile time and you must fix it to ship. I use OSPF in FRRouting to route across subnets and regions and I don't need anything else.

So, developing Eden platform forced me to think in global ways of how one organization can develop everything as a single unbeatable monolith which supports infrastructure of around eight million hosts. I am thinking globally. And that required some refactorings on my part early, to figure out how regions, datacenters and interconnections between datacenters play together for all infrastructure. I was forced to go through those decisions early, not when you need to expand to multiple datacenters in production and nobody has clue on how to do that and then it takes years because of poor early decisions.

The inferior alternative to looking down is to look up, be someone's bitch. For instance, I could have used something like dnscontrol for DNS and pray they support such and such provider for all dns records. Well, that's not good enough if you want to make all assumptions and have all control. So guess what Eden platform does? That's right, we run our own DNS servers, we use rock solid BIND that stood a test of time, hence we can look down. We do our own routing. We do our own builds and rollouts with rock solid and reproducible Nix build system.

I'm not yet into this at the time, but plan is also to just generate all the terraform code needed for every datacenter. Say, you'll specify in datacenter `implementation` column that aws is the implementation and then Eden platform will generate all the terraform for all the machines in their appropriate subnets which obey Eden platform ip scheme and they'll be automatically connected via wireguard to the rest of datacenters of Eden platform, which might be on premise, google cloud azure and etc. And if more than one AWS datacenter exists they'll be connected with native AWS transit gateway instead of wireguard. We can do tricks like that just because we have all the information about our intrastructure, and don't have to limit ourselves with wireguard across datacenters.

It's a lot more work, than say, some absolutely worthless project that I don't understand why anyone would use - FlywayDB. Typical Java crap that... Executes schema migrations. And a lot of people were convinced to use this nonsense. Eden platform rolls its own schema migrations because it's very simple to do BEGIN; execute all migrations; COMMIT ourselves. Database already provides these abstractions that make it easy. However, if key value store was used it would be much more complex.

So, I do not want to release half assed trash like FlywayDB which does one thing and you need to integrate it to everything else. For Eden platform to be useful it must connect and make everything to work together from day one. Eden platform should be all that you'll need, where everything is integrated and working together since day 1, just like Apple strives to do. I want to make assumptions about all the inrastructure, hence we must take control of all the components. When we take control of all the components we are looking down and our job becomes easier, while if we were looking up, such project as Eden platform would be practically impossible.

Man is taller than a woman and looks down on a woman. Say many men use the woman, like the library we talked about. How do you call such a woman that many men looked down upon and used her? We call her a harlot, and rightfully so.

In a perfect design for which we strive, if you look up you can only look up into one direction, have only one master to whom the component will fully submit and not be influenced by any other component. No woman can ever be shared between two men, it is an abomination.

Of course, Eden platform uses third party components that are generic, used up, and because they are not aware of the certain context, suboptimal in certain places. This is just the beginning to get things up and running.

Once Eden platform is built and running in production, then we can allow ourselves to have custom, better optimized components in certain context where generic ones are limiting. But that is very far into the future.

Long story short, if you want to make your life easy, do not be like an open source fag that desperately tries to support every new itch of platform under the sun. For instance, I'll likely release Eden platform only under NixOS because I consider other operating systems a waste of time. To make your life easy, start looking down, globally, about the global context of your app so you can make assumptions and you'll avoid so much trouble down the line where most other engineers will be bogged down by meaningless indecision inducing details.

Have a good day bois.

Sup guys, it's been a while you lurkers that read my posts but stay silent.

I'm working on Eden platform now, and basis of that is EdenDB, to which I make changes as I need them when working on eden platform. I've made quite a few improvements since last improvements post.

Ability to refer to other element's children through REF FOREIGN CHILD syntax

The need for this arose when I needed for abstractions, like NATS or PostgreSQL instances to specify on that volumes they reside.

Say this is a server table (simplified)
TABLE server {
  hostname TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
}
It has volumes as children (simplified)

TABLE server_volume {
  volume_name TEXT PRIMARY KEY CHILD OF server,
  mountpoint TEXT,
}

So say you have server-a with defined volumes

DATA server(hostname) {
  server-a WITH server_volume {
    pgtest1, '/srv/volumes/pgtest1';
  };
  server-b WITH server_volume {
    pgtest1, '/srv/volumes/pgtest1';
  };
}

And we need to define a postgres instance of a single cluster (simplified from real schema)

TABLE db_deployment {
    deployment_name TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
}

TABLE db_deployment_instance {
    deployment_id INT PRIMARY KEY CHILD OF db_deployment,
    db_server REF FOREIGN CHILD server_volume,

    CHECK { deployment_id > 0 },
}

So now we say that we want our foo logical database, with three replicas defined, one will be master with patroni and other replica.

DATA STRUCT db_deployment [
  {
    deployment_name: foo WITH db_deployment_instance [
      {
        deployment_id: 1,
        db_server: server-a=>pgtest1,
      },
      {
        deployment_id: 2,
        db_server: server-b=>pgtest1,
      },
    ]
  }
]

Notice, how we refer to the volume of `server-a` and `server-b` where we want data to reside using `=>` operator, which means child element.
We could nest this arbitrarily deep.

So, by using foreign child syntax syntax we do two things:
1. Specify which server runs the database (parent of the volume)
2. Specify where data on server runs

And, of course, you cannot define non existing elements in EdenDB, so you cannot make a typo of specifying non existing server or volume (unlike in typical yaml hell)

Full gist is here https://gist.github.com/cultleader777/41210e58026a0bec29f7e014945e40b0

Refer to the child element with REF CHILD syntax

Another issue I had working on eden platform is that I wanted to refer to the child element from parent element.
Say, server has multiple network interfaces, how to we specify which interface exposes ssh for us to connect and provision server with?

Say this schema (simplified from original)

TABLE server {
  hostname TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  ssh_interface REF CHILD network_interface,
}

TABLE network {
    network_name TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
    cidr TEXT,
}

TABLE network_interface {
    if_name TEXT PRIMARY KEY CHILD OF server,
    if_network REF network,
    if_ip TEXT,
    if_subnet_mask_cidr INT,
}

So, network interface is a child of server and we can refer to the child from the parent so that we know on which network interface we ssh to every machine.

DATA STRUCT network [
  {
    network_name: lan,
    cidr: '10.16.0.0/12',
  }
]

DATA server(hostname, ssh_interface) {
  server-a, eth0 WITH network_interface {
    eth0, lan, 10.17.0.10, 24;
  };
}

Also, we can refer to child of arbitrary depth with the `=>` syntax from parent.

TABLE existant_parent {
    some_key TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
    spec_child REF CHILD existant_child_2,
}

TABLE existant_child {
    some_child_key TEXT PRIMARY KEY CHILD OF existant_parent,
}

TABLE existant_child_2 {
    some_child_key_2 TEXT PRIMARY KEY CHILD OF existant_child,
}

DATA existant_parent {
    outer_val, inner_val=>henloz WITH existant_child {
        inner_val WITH existant_child_2 {
            henlo
        }
    }
}

As usual, EdenDB fails to compile if existing child elements don't exist.

Full example here https://gist.github.com/cultleader777/d4f26449d2814a30d6b34e55c5d19c76

Detached defaults with DETACHED DEFAULT syntax

I had an issue of working on Eden platform that if default is defined in the database schema then it can't be changed by the user.
This is because eden platform schema resides in one set of files and user defines data in his own set of files.

Say, server has hostname and belongs to tld in the schema file

TABLE server {
  hostname TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  tld REF tld DETACHED DEFAULT,
  fqdn TEXT GENERATED AS { hostname .. "." .. tld },
}

TABLE tld {
  domain TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
}

Now, it would be not nice to specify to which TLD server belongs in the default. Every user of eden platform will have its own domain.
So tld element is DETACHED DEFAULT. It must be defined by the user, and can only ever be defined once. If it is not defined, or defined multiple times it is compiler error.


DEFAULTS {
  // defines default for table 'server' and column 'tld'.
  // you cannot define defaults for non existing tables
  // and column must be marked as detached default
  server.tld epl-infra.net,
}

// now we can define data with detached default
DATA STRUCT server {
  hostname: server-a
}

DATA tld {
  epl-infra.net;
}

Full example here https://gist.github.com/cultleader777/3823ccef5c22b4b086c2468ab9e2e89c

And these are the main features I needed to add to EdenDB so far while working on eden platform compiler.

See you later bois!

This is a long overdue post about assembly. Typically, what we know about assembly language today is that those are low level instructions that fiddle very low level operations with CPU registers, memory, interrupts and etc. In this day and age nobody but compiler writers care about assembly. But even then, if you write a compiler LLVM is available to you where you emit LLVM IR (intermediate representation) instructions and LLVM generates assembly code. It could be x86, arm, PowerPC or any number of supported architectures.

Whatever new assembly language comes out specific for certain chip only very few people of programmer population needs to understand that to port it to yet another platform and all that will be available for the rest of the programmers to use. Today, 99%+ developers don't care about assembly. It is good to understand what it is and how it works, to have conceptual understanding, but to actually fiddle assembly code by hand you either need to have extremely good reason or you're just pretentious or insane.

Why am I talking about this? As I'm developing Eden platform now I need to generate a lot of code. Be it Rust code, shell scripts, nomad job files - all of them are generated now. I don't write these by hand. Most people what is generated in my framework today need to write by hand, care about it, maintain it, fiddle with it, have tests for it.

What I see as inevitable future most of the code people write today will turn into assembly automatically generated without mistakes. No more need to maintain those, you just connect high level table data in eden data language and things will just work. You will not be able to misconfigure service with a bad dns name to connect a certain postgres instance like you can in a garbage yaml hell. You will not be able to operate in DNS names - DNS names to consul services will simply be an irrelevant implementation detail. Part of our generated assembly. What you want to say instead is that deployment of this service speaks to this instance of database which has this and this schema. You don't care about implementation details of DNS.

Today virtually everyone tests this higher level assembly. Is service running? Does it open a port? Does it respond to such and such http request with such and such response?

Of course, compiler writers also have huge test suites that test assembly, certain behaviours of generated code. In the beginning of GCC compiler there were probably lots of bugs, with time they became less and less common to a point where average user encountering a compiler bug is similar to a chance of winning a lottery. Usually, once GCC or rustc runs and compiler successfully emits output, you assume that basic behaviours are correct.

But how can that be? Rustc emit executables with assembly code! You would be crazy to rely on assembly? Since there are high level rules in Rust which are enforced with tests and we now mainly trust that compiler is reasonably correct we trust Rust programs much more than Javascript programs (if you have any sanity) even though both programs are running on the same CPU and they're running same assembly instructions underneath.

With the pattern, most yamls, infrastructure configurations that you'd need to maintain by hand become assembly. Most Rust application code not written by the user becomes assembly. Consul configs become assembly. Nomad configs become assembly. Vault configs become assembly. Postgres configs become assembly. SQL migrations become assembly. NATS configs become assembly. MinIO configs become assembly. Consul policies become assembly. Vault policies become assembly. Nomad job declarations become assembly. Server nix configurations become assembly. Application build scripts become assembly. Nginx configs become assembly.

Another property of assembly is that compiler optimizations change and assembly changes but code doesn't have to. Users don't care. Now at this point for instance I use Nix to provision all servers and have reproducible builds. It is my favorite OS and package manager which will make Eden platform rock solid. But hypothetically, what happens if one day for some reason I will no longer like NixOS as server operating system? I'll just change the assembly code generated for server provisioning and VM images built (user doesn't care and doesn't need to know) to something else in one commit and that's it. Assembly will never be the most important. Assembly is swappable. Assembly is an implementation detail.

And what is the future of assembly? It will become irrelevant. Needless to say there are lots of errors in Eden platform compiler I'm working on during development, but the more and more test written, the more mature this project will become it will be like GCC and Rustc - once compiler runs, tests assumptions/consistencies/port clashes/RAM boundaries/typesafety of applications/db query correctness of your entire infrastructure of 1000 servers and 1000 applications and emits source outputs in a few seconds for your entire infrastructure - you'll just assume things will work and deploy with a smile. Without spinning up thousands of machines for testing. Without spinning up thousands of services.

And what is the future of developers that today need to maintain such assembly? Check job postings for x86 assembly programmers and find out

Have a good day bois!