8sync 0.4.2 "FOSDEM Edition" released, plus videos!

-- Sat 18 March 2017

I'm happy to announce the release of 8sync 0.4.2, AKA "8sync FOSDEM Edition"! The two main features in this release are that the web server code has moved to an actor, and that we also now have a websockets implementing actor. (Code snarfed from David Thompson's great work on guile-websocket! In the future, 8sync may use guile-websocket directly instead of snarfing its code.)

We're calling it 8sync FOSDEM Edition because, you guessed it, this is the set of code used during the demonstration of 8sync at FOSDEM 2017. (The recording of that talk is now up, as well as a variation of it I gave at the Chicago GNU/Linux user group, which I've linked from the 8sync homepage now.) The talks demonstrate 8sync through live hacking a multiplayer game built with Mudsync. (I've also pushed up a fosdem-2017 tag of Mudsync in case you want to try running it yourself.)

You may have also seen the exciting news that Guile 2.2.0 has been released! Congratulations to the whole Guile team and community! This is also good news since 8sync uses some Guile 2.2 specific features, so we're now no longer depending on an unstable release. Horray! Be sure to also read Andy Wingo's reflections on Guile 2.2. Relatedly, Fibers 1.0 was released recently... maybe it's about time to see if we can fit 8sync on top of Fibers. Only one way to find out if it's a good fit!

That's all for now. Happy hacking!