18 December 2025

Back from Vacation

So, I’m back from vacation! Decided to cut it short just a little bit ‘cause I am just itching to get back into my projects.

There is a LOT of stuff I have planned for the coming months. Obviously I’ll be working on Benben again, but there are also other things that orbit around Benben that need attention. So these are the most immediate things I plan to work on, probably switching between them every so often:

• CL-SDM will be getting a bit of reorganization and final polishing, and then will finally hit v1.0! There’s a few last-minute breaking changes I want to make is all, mostly to make the main ASDF system slightly less bloated.
• CL-RemiZMQ is one of two new projects. It’s a set of bindings for libzmq that are more complete and usable than cl-zmq, and also a higher-level API that lets you do ZeroMQ stuff more easily. I may be using this for a few Benben features in the medium future… I don’t want to reveal too much yet, just in case these features never see the light of day.

• The second new project is a generic build tool for Benben, XQATool, and any other Common Lisp programs I build. The design will be similar to how Shards works for Crystal, and will make them extremely easy to build compared to how you build them now. This also allows me to drop AppImages, which I now want to do because of the developer.

  Note that I’m purposely NOT extending ASDF here since I don’t think it should be in the business of downloading and managing packages. It also won’t do things like Quicklisp (which I never really liked) does because I think having per-project sets of libraries is a much better idea (e.g. program X may need a Cool Library v1.2, but program Y needs Cool Library v2.4, and the two aren’t compatible). This has been started, but I don’t have any code up yet. It’ll use my RSConf format for its files. It’ll also be written in Crystal specifically to simplify the bootstrapping process for new users.

• CL-RemiAudio will be getting more ADPCM stuff added to it, encoding and decoding.
• My own port of the a2ln server from Python to Common Lisp because it does NOT like my system Python, and I do NOT like using things like asdf (the version manager thing, not the Common Lisp tool). Rather than fight Python Hell™, I’ll just write it in a sensible language. This is kind of a priority right now because of some offline things I need to handle with my mom, so expect me to focus on CL-RemiZMQ and this for a few weeks.
• Work on the task of persisting ListenBrainz scrobbles in Benben’s v1.0.0 milestone so that, if ListenBrainz can’t be reached, you can still submit your scrobbles at a later date. I’ll probably just store them in an SQLite database or something.
• Fix a laptop that I have. It needs its keyboard replaced. sigh…

Plus, you know… that uhh… whole laundry list of Benben v1.0.0 milestones to address… cough. And SatouSynth’s next release… Yeah, I can already tell you that Benben v1.0.0 won’t be out until very late next year; I am, after all, just one woman working on this in her spare time :-P

But yeah overall, I think this is going to be a very fun year as far as my projects go.

Welp, time to hack some code.