Richard Feldman (May 28 2023 at 18:09): Richard Feldman (May 28 2023 at 18:09):so sometime in the second half of 2023 I'd like to update roc-lang.org again
Richard Feldman (May 28 2023 at 18:09):to reflect all the progress we've made!
Richard Feldman (May 28 2023 at 18:21):so far the goals of the website have been:
Richard Feldman (May 28 2023 at 18:22):so at a high level, I think a good goal for the next iteration of the website would be "looks more like a typical programming language website" (e.g. it's actually styled, unlike today's which is explicitly unstyled) but still isn't a "pitch" website. It's not trying to sell you on how awesome Roc is; rather, it talks about the goals and current progress toward those goals
Richard Feldman (May 28 2023 at 18:23):so the content would be similar to today, but it would look more like a normal language website - e.g. it would have a real layout, navigational links (like the tutorial does across the top), etc.
Richard Feldman (May 28 2023 at 18:24):and then the biggest change I'd like to make is to incorporate the web repl into the front page, so you can try out the language right away
Richard Feldman (May 28 2023 at 18:25):specifically I like the idea of having a little code snippet right there, but have it be something you can interact with right away if you focus into the input box right below it (I have some ideas on how this could look and work)
Richard Feldman (May 28 2023 at 18:26):so if anyone is interested in working on this, lmk! I know @Georges Boris has expressed interest, but maybe others are interested in collaborating on it too!
Georges Boris (May 28 2023 at 18:34):do you have some reference sites that you feel are similar to what you would hope for this?
Anton (May 29 2023 at 09:20):#5136 should probably be fixed before we incorporate the web repl into the front page.
A lot of people will probably also be hit by the unavailability of entering definitions #5301
Sky Rose (May 29 2023 at 16:06):I like the Pony website, and think it could be a good model for this (though the language and website are both a little more polished than Roc): https://www.ponylang.io
Agus Zubiaga (May 30 2023 at 15:36):You know it's gonna be solid when the website has Richard's signature with a text gradient on it:
CleanShot-2023-05-30-at-12.35.522x.png
Éber Freitas Dias (May 31 2023 at 17:59):I don't know how, but I would love to contribute to this :nerd:
Anton (May 31 2023 at 18:04):Hi @Éber Freitas Dias,
What precisely would you like to contribute to? Are you referring to this:
a good goal for the next iteration of the website would be "looks more like a typical programming language website"
Éber Freitas Dias (May 31 2023 at 18:05):I can contribute with design (UX/UI) and coding. Not the best designer around, but I can try and help.
Éber Freitas Dias (May 31 2023 at 18:06):Maybe a little off-topic but, does roc already has some kind of logo design in place?
Anton (May 31 2023 at 18:07):Maybe a little off-topic but, does roc already has some kind of logo design in place?
Yes, this the roc logo: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/63474338?s=200&v=4
Éber Freitas Dias (May 31 2023 at 18:08):Anton said:
Yes, this the roc logo: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/63474338?s=200&v=4
Right, but what in terms of typography? Are we going for a specific thing with the text?
Anton (May 31 2023 at 18:09):We don't have a roc style guide yet, but I think a lot of people are happy with the fonts used in the docs.
Georges Boris (May 31 2023 at 18:10):@Éber Freitas Dias there are also some design tokens available! @Richard Feldman could you maybe link what your friend created here? I'll upload that to roc/design-assets (also, if you could link the current logos, it would be great to also host it there)
Richard Feldman (May 31 2023 at 18:11):yeah, they're all in https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/issues/3274
Richard Feldman (May 31 2023 at 18:12):also note that the tutorial has some elements that overlap with the docs but not completely: https://www.roc-lang.org/tutorial (the tutorial is more recent than the docs, but neither of them is authoritative in terms of style; both are just independent experiments, and nothing is set in stone!)
Éber Freitas Dias (May 31 2023 at 18:16):Thanks. Sorry to disrupt with so many questions. I can see that design-wise we already have paths and proposals. Let me know how I can contribute :blush:
Luke Boswell (May 31 2023 at 18:41):One of the things I was trying to do was unify the css files so they use the same styles. The idea there being that maybe we can link to a single file and this will make the site more maintainable when everything it sitting together on the next update. There is also the Examples site too, Tutorial, Docs.
Georges Boris (May 31 2023 at 19:01):worth noting that we had a pool some time ago and people generally preferred the color palette on the docs - so the idea would be to apply that palette to the tutorial as well iirc
Richard Feldman (May 31 2023 at 19:07):sure, although also feel free to experiment with variations and post screenshots so we can discuss...like I said, everything's an experiment at this stage! :big_smile:
Luke Boswell (Jul 16 2023 at 01:31):I want to give an update on progress with the 2023 website for @Georges Boris @Éber Freitas Dias and anyone else who is interested in contributing. PRs most welcome :smile:
We have made a start on the basic structure for the new site which for now is sitting at www/wip_new_website on main, and includes a local build script using roc run build.roc. It is generated using the static-site-gen platform which gives us Roc code syntax highlighting and enables most of the content to be written in markdown.
Ideally we will update the site prior to Roctoberfest, as this supports that activity and in preparation for 2023 Advent of Code.
The new site has the following structure;
The initial focus has been to try and scope out what should be included. For now this basically just pages and headings which loosly define structure, and are supported by dot points or comments to capture ideas. Richard provided input here so we have a reasonable starting point.
There is a lot of things that need work. For example there has been almost no work on styling or content. It is still very much a work in progress and all contributions welcome.
Some ideas for things that would be hlepful;
Luke Boswell (Jul 16 2023 at 01:31):Also you can visit the WIP site sitting on main at https://www.roc-lang.org/wip
Richard Feldman (Aug 10 2023 at 19:39):I made a little interactive code example thing for the new homepage - https://jsfiddle.net/L1xh7k9j/ (you have to drag to expand the bottom right square to see the whole thing)
this particular code snippet is just a proof of concept; I want to actually use it on a bigger example of error handling (e.g. in basic-cli, do some File I/O and then some HTTP, and then see how all the errors combine to a single exhaustive when), so people can click through quite a bit of different syntax and learn about the language that way. I know when some people encounter a new language, they like to learn by seeing code examples, so I figure this could be a good experience for them right on the homepage.
it's all plain HTML and CSS, no JS - I generated it using this roc script
Luke Boswell (Aug 11 2023 at 00:28):Nice, I like how users can easily walk through the code with the descriptions and skip anything they are already comfortable with.
Are you thinking of having this on the home page instead of the WebREPL?
Richard Feldman (Aug 11 2023 at 00:29):in addition to!
Richard Feldman (Aug 11 2023 at 00:30):I'm thinking this would be further down the page
Richard Feldman (Aug 11 2023 at 00:30):as a larger example
Richard Feldman (Aug 26 2023 at 03:30):I made a mockup of a layout idea for the homepage:
the big code example at the bottom would be done using the hover-to-learn-more thing I shared above - so it would have syntax highlighting and you could hover over things to learn about specific language features like pipelines, backpassing, error handling, tasks, string interpolation, etc.
Richard Feldman (Aug 26 2023 at 03:31):there would be more content below this, but I'm curious what people think about this as a first impression - like imagine you visit roc-lang.org, you don't know what the language is about yet, and this is the first thing you see
Brendan Hansknecht (Aug 26 2023 at 03:36):Quite spaced out up top. Feels like too much dead space
Brendan Hansknecht (Aug 26 2023 at 03:36):Also, not an issue with the website, but the size that it is showing at on my computer is zoomed poorly which doesn't help with initial reading and judgement.
Brendan Hansknecht (Aug 26 2023 at 03:39):Also, kinda feels too flat.
Brendan Hansknecht (Aug 26 2023 at 03:40):But content seems fine especially if dump right to an interactive explanation tool that works well and has nice colors
Sky Rose (Aug 26 2023 at 13:07):It seems like the platforms concept needs a mention somewhere near the top. That's such a unique feature for a programming language, and a reason someone might want to use Roc, and a reason someone might have heard about Roc and want more info.
Richard Feldman (Aug 27 2023 at 18:49):I thought about mentioning platforms and applications early, but it doesn't seem like a good "first impression" thing to me because it requires a lot of explanation. I don't think if it says something like "Novel “platforms and applications” design" or something it really helps answer the basic question of "is this a language I might be interested in?" and I think if I explain the whole thing, it's going to overwhelm the other basic info :big_smile:
Richard Feldman (Aug 27 2023 at 19:13):here's a less spaced-out version
Richard Feldman (Aug 27 2023 at 19:14):and here it is alongside several other PL homepages, for comparison:
Richard Feldman (Aug 27 2023 at 19:19):here's another version with syntax highlighting matching the color scheme (at least for that initial code snippet)
Luke Boswell (Aug 27 2023 at 20:06):I like the layout. It look clean and uncluttered, simple too.
Zeljko Nesic (Aug 27 2023 at 20:50):I would put origami bird in the line with big purple Roc, because PL logos are "wevy-wevy-impovtant" for any conf talk :angel:
Richard Feldman (Aug 27 2023 at 21:34):ha, yeah I guess all the others have the logo next to the name except Java
Zeljko Nesic (Aug 27 2023 at 21:49):Tbh, not all of them, but it might be helpful imprinting visual cue right away - and there is plenty of white space to do so on this layout to do so.
Agus Zubiaga (Aug 27 2023 at 22:56):Maybe each point could have a related icon instead of a star?
Richard Feldman (Aug 28 2023 at 10:43):yeah I tried that at first but it felt more distracting than helpful
Anton (Aug 30 2023 at 07:26):I like the vibe :)
I do prefer using columns for the fast, friendly and functional explanations like Rust does. Three full-width text blocks feels quite dense.
"Like Rust and clang, it compiles to unboxed values using monomorphization and LLVM for optimizations." is quite a complicated sentence for the average programmer. I would share this information later in the page.
Brian Carroll (Aug 30 2023 at 07:40):Yeah I had the same thought. "Unboxed", "monomorphization", and "LLVM" are familiar terms for compiler developers, and maybe systems programmers, but not really for high level app developers.
Brian Carroll (Aug 30 2023 at 07:44):Maybe summarise it as compiling to machine code like Rust and C++, then add details further down.
Richard Feldman (Sep 09 2023 at 20:17):new Swift website: https://www.swift.org/
the "use cases" section is pretty nice
Richard Feldman (Sep 14 2023 at 02:12):I put together a draft of a page elaborating on what the "fast" in "fast, friendly, functional" means: https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/768d80df24befbbe9dac249faedb6617 (I want to do the same for "friendly" and "functional" too) - any feedback welcome!
Luke Boswell (Sep 14 2023 at 02:50):wow, cool. I learnt some things reading that. I don't have many comments, reads really well and is easy to follow.
Brendan Hansknecht (Sep 14 2023 at 03:07):I don't like the flow of this sentence for some reason. Not sure if it is this sentence specifically or due to the context of the surrounding text:
Similarly, for design reasons unrelated to performance, all I/O operations in Roc are asynchronous.
Brendan Hansknecht (Sep 14 2023 at 03:12):This isn't exactly true:
If Roc data structures are shared across threads (which might or might not come up, depending on the platform), then atomic reference counting must be used, which is slower.
There are plans that use owner and non owner reference counts where a specific thread is the owner. In practice this can often mostly use non-atomic reference counting. Well it is true an atomic will probably be used somewhere, there are multiple schemes that avoid atomics almost all the time.
Brendan Hansknecht (Sep 14 2023 at 03:15):Good read overall
Brendan Hansknecht (Sep 14 2023 at 03:16):Last comment. Maybe you are overselling:
Unfortunately, linking on macOS is much more complex than on any of those others, so it's taking longer to implement.
It theoretically shouldn't be much more complicated, but it is much less documented and needs more work.
Richard Feldman (Sep 14 2023 at 18:07):ok I made a revised version!
https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/768d80df24befbbe9dac249faedb6617
Brian Carroll (Sep 14 2023 at 22:07):The dev backend is currently implemented for WebAssembly, which you can see in the Web REPL, and in roc repl on x64 Linux.
This sounds like it's saying that roc repl on x64 Linux is implemented using the WebAssembly dev backend.
Or at least that it uses some dev backend.
But neither of those things is true. roc repl uses LLVM, regardless of target.
Brian Carroll (Sep 14 2023 at 22:07):We actually looked at the code together the other day, and it was calling LLVM
Richard Feldman (Sep 14 2023 at 22:09):that's true today! Although I'm assuming https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/pull/5805 will get merged before this goes live :grinning:
Brian Carroll (Sep 14 2023 at 22:10):Oh wow :astonished:
Brian Carroll (Sep 14 2023 at 22:11):I have been a little out of touch lately. Sounds there's been an enormous amount of progress on the dev backend! :tada:
Richard Feldman (Sep 14 2023 at 22:15):yeah! @Folkert de Vries has been jamming on it :guitar:
Brian Carroll (Sep 14 2023 at 22:19):Ah that makes sense then! Nobody better for making massive progress fast! :rocket:
Folkert de Vries (Sep 14 2023 at 22:26):brought to you by a week of vacation. (well, 2 days). Now I have to fix the long tail of subtle alignment bugs
Brendan Hansknecht (Sep 14 2023 at 23:13):However, there is plenty of room for further compiler optimizations; current optimizations include only LLVM, Morphic, and Perceus. Promising examples of potential future optimizations include closure-aware inlining, automatic deforestation, and full compile-time evaluation of top-level declarations.
This reads a bit dense to me.
Probably cause a lot of names LLVM, Morphic, Perceus. Then a lot of optimizations that people may or may not have context for.
Also, saying only LLVM sounds funny given it is the standard for tons of compiler optimizations and passes.
Richard Feldman (Sep 14 2023 at 23:22):fair, although I think for people who are interested in optimizations, they'll really appreciate the specifics
Richard Feldman (Sep 14 2023 at 23:22):e.g. we get asked a lot if we've heard of Perceus :big_smile:
Richard Feldman (Sep 18 2023 at 15:54):I made some styling changes to /repl to make it look more like the rest of the site: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/pull/5826
cc @Brian Carroll
Benjamin Jordanou-Bailey (Sep 18 2023 at 19:35):Richard Feldman said:
ok I made a revised version!
https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/768d80df24befbbe9dac249faedb6617
This reads very well!
Richard Feldman (Sep 18 2023 at 21:02):btw I tried using performance.now() to time how long the web repl takes to completely evaluate and render the output of entries, and I'm consistently seeing numbers around 60-80ms between when the browser gets the Enter key event and when it's added the output to the DOM - and that's counting all the JavaScript in between! :mind_blown:
HUGE props to @Brian Carroll for making the wasm code generation and surgical linking work...I'm so excited to get this on the homepage and show it off :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
Brian Carroll (Sep 18 2023 at 21:04):Ooh nice! :big_smile:
Luke Boswell (Sep 19 2023 at 02:46):@Richard Feldman are there any parts of the WIP site that you would like assistance with? Maybe drafting content?
Richard Feldman (Sep 19 2023 at 16:44):yes! So Netlify recently deprecated their automatic asset optimization feature, which means we'll need to start doing our own minification and such explicitly in our Netlify builds
Richard Feldman (Sep 19 2023 at 16:50):some specific things I think we should do in that build:
Richard Feldman (Sep 19 2023 at 16:52):I know npm has the best ecosystem for optimizations like thus, but I'd really like to keep npm out of the normal build process, so people don't need npm to build the site locally
Richard Feldman (Sep 19 2023 at 16:52):for example maybe we could have something like www/optmize.sh - so you can try the optimizations locally if you have npm installed and want to try out changes to the optimization build process, but it's a separate and totally optional thing...and then in our Netlify build process, we have it run optimize.sh after the normal build process
Brian Carroll (Sep 19 2023 at 21:44):We could bundle the REPL JS files just using cat. It's not like a big JS project, there's only 3 files. One of them is generated and the other 2 are handwritten. They'll need to be slightly modified but that's fine.
Brian Carroll (Sep 19 2023 at 21:47):If we leave out the bundler it might simplify things a lot
Richard Feldman (Sep 19 2023 at 21:54):that's a great point! Yeah I guess we could just use sed to remove the import statements
Richard Feldman (Sep 19 2023 at 21:54):and then cat to combine them, love it :+1:
Luke Boswell (Sep 20 2023 at 11:11):I had a bit of an attempt at combining the JS files... almost worked ok. Got a bit stuck on the module where we were referencing things like roc_repl_wasm.entrypoint_from_js or roc_repl_wasm.default. I had another idea and almost got it working, but just wondering what people think of using something like parcel-bundler with e.g. parcel build index.html to combine and minify and add cache busting names etc.
Richard Feldman (Sep 20 2023 at 12:36):I'm ok with that as long as we do it in a separate optimize.sh and it's not necessary to have npm installed to build the site locally for normal development! :big_smile:
Brian Carroll (Sep 20 2023 at 16:11):I don't really understand why we need this though. It's a few kB of JS, and 2MB of compressed Wasm. Feels like shaving a few bytes off the JS and CSS is not going to matter
Anton (Sep 20 2023 at 16:25):Yeah it seems like something we should do minimal benchmarks for before we add it. Minifying definitely can make things harder to debug even when it's only used in production.
Richard Feldman (Sep 20 2023 at 18:06):bundling would be more about minimizing network requests than total bytes
Brian Carroll (Sep 20 2023 at 19:23):OK well my idea was that bundling is relatively easy to do. It's just concatenating strings and stuff. Whereas minification requires proper npm libraries. But npm libraries are heavy.
Now, it looks like the WIP new website is using the static site generator. What if it was able to read your JS/CSS files, concatenate them, and insert them into <style> and <script> tags? Then you get one HTML file in one network request. And a second one for the .wasm file, which can't be helped.
Brian Carroll (Sep 20 2023 at 19:28):It's just concatenating strings and stuff
That's assuming we'd edit the files to delete the import statements, in a PR.
All the JS would be in the same namespace so you wouldn't need to say roc_repl_wasm.entrypoint_from_js, it would just be entrypoint_from_js because it would be defined "locally" in the concatenated file.
And the generated file also has export default __wbg_init;, so roc_repl_wasm.default would become __wbg_init.
You'd need to do the concatenation in dev as well to see the effect of your changes, so that's a downside.
Brian Carroll (Sep 20 2023 at 19:29):Anyway it's just an idea. It might be more familiar to people to do it the npm way.
Richard Feldman (Sep 20 2023 at 19:56):ah I see! I like that idea :thumbs_up:
Richard Feldman (Sep 20 2023 at 19:57):basically I'm in favor of:
Richard Feldman (Sep 20 2023 at 19:57):worth noting that npx could be a good option here - like don't have config files or anything, just optimize.sh which runs stuff like npx minify *.html or whatever
Richard Feldman (Sep 20 2023 at 20:08):also worth noting: we have to have at least 1 network request to load fonts, and that's render-blocking, so having 1 js and 1 css in parallel with that likely makes no difference because the font is the bottleneck to rendering anyway
Richard Feldman (Sep 20 2023 at 20:09):and there are also of course caching benefits to doing that instead of inlining them all the way
Richard Feldman (Sep 20 2023 at 20:09):that said, having a JS file that loads other JS files over the network could become the bottleneck instead
Brian Carroll (Sep 20 2023 at 20:35):Oh, do fonts block the initial render? I thought it would render with a default font in the same family and then re-render.
Brian Carroll (Sep 20 2023 at 20:35):We can get rid of JS loading more JS. Maybe load them in separate script tags.
ABuffSeagull (Sep 21 2023 at 05:04):Richard Feldman said:
- there's some way to minimize fonts based on actual content - e.g. strip out the glyphs that don't come up in any of our .html files - I don't know what the name of the tool is that does it, but since we serve our own fonts and have all the content in static .html files, we should be able to do that too!
The tool you're looking for is a font subsetter. If you don't mind doing it manually, this online tool is my usual goto. I still haven't found a good CLI tool to do it, only this library is the easiest/closest thing to what I want, but I also haven't really looked outside the JS ecosystem.
Richard Feldman (Sep 21 2023 at 05:27):that library sounds great! :100:
Richard Feldman (Sep 21 2023 at 05:28):yeah the JS ecosystem is by far the most mature for optimizing web pages
Richard Feldman (Sep 21 2023 at 05:28):makes it very difficult to avoid npm haha
Luke Boswell (Sep 21 2023 at 09:58):If anyone would like to work on the above optimisation idea then please let us know. I don't think I will be able to make much progress on this anytime soon.
Richard Feldman (Sep 26 2023 at 01:29):I wrote up a functional.md draft to go with the earlier fast.md (I'm still working on friendly.md) - any feedback welcome!
Luke Boswell (Sep 26 2023 at 02:17):Overall it reads really well. I really enjoyed it and learnt some new things which was cool. I feel like it kind of just ended.. like maybe it could do with a conclusion? but not sure.
I had to read this a couple of times, maybe reword?
which can be less error-prone than defensive copying (which might be accidentally forgotten), but which—to be fair—can also increase unintentional copying
I had to read this a couple of times, I think the double negative was hard to parse
Roc's automatic reference counting neither pays for runtime cycle collection nor memory leaks from cycles, because the language's lack of direct mutation primitives lets it rule out reference cycles at language design time.
That last sentence seemed to just sit there and didnt seem connected or supported. Maybe I missed how these tradeoffs fit the design goals, but first read through I paused at this point.
, and that performance optimization will tend to involve more profiling. These tradeoffs fit well with the language's overall design goals.
Is this supported by any anaylsis or references or more of an anecdotal observation? Just seemed to be a rather key point of your argument.
These scenarios tend to be rare enough across code bases, and the performance benefit small enough, that it's acceptable for Roc to omit these language primitives
Richard Feldman (Sep 26 2023 at 02:49):more of an anecdotal observation. Mainly I wanted to acknowledge a tradeoff (one I assume exists)
Richard Feldman (Sep 26 2023 at 02:52):I could maybe add a "likely" there to clarify
Ayaz Hafiz (Sep 26 2023 at 03:05): Richard Feldman (Sep 26 2023 at 10:45):all good feedback, thanks!
Pearce Keesling (Sep 26 2023 at 13:08):I'm curious if SSO plays a factor in the text trimming example. I'm assuming you can't subslice a stack value? Maybe that's an incorrect assumption. I'm also not sure if SSO would be faster than a subslice since both are just stack allocations
Richard Feldman (Sep 26 2023 at 13:19):hm, that's a good point...maybe I should use a non-string example there :thinking:
Pearce Keesling (Sep 26 2023 at 13:30):I don't know if anyone who's seeing it for the first time is going to consider SSO, I was mostly just curious. I think it's a cool example cause it shows multiple possible optimization paths
ABuffSeagull (Sep 26 2023 at 16:09):Now that I'm back from a mini-vacation, I should have some free time to look into an optimization script
Richard Feldman (Sep 26 2023 at 16:19):awesome! :smiley:
Richard Feldman (Sep 26 2023 at 23:14):ok, here's the revised draft! https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/435a99219a0c645f5b640c6f1a251aea
Luke Boswell (Sep 26 2023 at 23:24):I really like it. I'm definitely keen to share with my mates. I find it hard sometimes to explain all these ideas without getting tripped up on too much detail, this reads like a good overview in my opinion.
Brendan Hansknecht (Sep 26 2023 at 23:29):This includes shadowing, which is disallowed
I am still not sold on this premise, though it is the state of current roc. Whenever I see code with x1, x2, x3, etc... it is just painful. Makes the code harder to read, brittle to change, and more error prone. Pipelining does fix one class of this issue, but not all of them.
ABuffSeagull (Sep 27 2023 at 04:20):I'm heading to bed right now, but I can't seem to get the wip site building. I'm getting compiler version mismatches (missing linux-x86_64.rh file). Trying the --prebuilt-platform=false doesn't fix it. I'm sure I'm missing a simple step to get it to use a local version, but I have no idea what it is.
Luke Boswell (Sep 27 2023 at 06:37):I've just made a PR #5858 to fix the wip site roc build script.
Luke Boswell (Sep 27 2023 at 06:40):Then you should be able to build it with % cd www/wip_new_website && roc run build.roc. If you don't already have it you may need to run cargo install simple-http-server
ABuffSeagull (Sep 28 2023 at 00:12):Thank you for the update! But It's a slightly different problem:
I was expecting this file to exist:
/root/.cache/roc/packages/github.com/roc-lang/basic-cli/releases/download/0.5.0/Cufzl36_SnJ4QbOoEmiJ5dIpUxBvdB3NEySvuH82Wio/linux-x86_64.rh
However, it was not there!
Note: If the platform does have an .rh1 file but no .rh file, it's because it's been built with an older version of roc. Contact the author to release a new build of the platform using a roc release newer than March 21 2023.
If you have the platform's source code locally, you may be able to generate it by re-running this command with --prebuilt-platform=false
I'm not sure. Maybe you have an older version of Roc cli? @Anton would know what is going on here.
Richard Feldman (Sep 28 2023 at 02:13):I made the web repl mobile-friendly: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/pull/5862
this way when people are pulling it up to check it out after @Brian Carroll's talk next week, it will look nice on their phones, too! :smiley:
Brian Carroll (Sep 28 2023 at 05:38):Awesome, thanks!
Brian Carroll (Sep 28 2023 at 08:43):I followed up with a PR to match the height of the loading message to the height of the loaded state
Also removed wasi.js since I now realise it's impossible for user code to ever use it. The REPL "platform" doesn't have any effects, only memory allocation.
Anton (Sep 29 2023 at 07:58):@ABuffSeagull looks like you're using an older version of roc, I'd recommend trying again with the latest nightly.
ABuffSeagull (Oct 01 2023 at 16:30):Huh, I guess so. I could've sworn that I was using the one I was building with nix develop but I was probably just forgetting to set my PATH or something. Thank you though, got me on the right track
Georges Boris (Oct 11 2023 at 18:13):hey folks - is there any public link for the WIP 2023 website? (I ended up starting Roctoberfest late and I wanted to follow the steps of someone coming to the language for the first time)
Richard Feldman (Oct 11 2023 at 18:25):it's currently at https://www.roc-lang.org/wip although there's a bunch of un-merged stuff
Richard Feldman (Oct 17 2023 at 02:32):I wrote up a little thing for roc-lang.org/bdfn - https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/67ae19aa2515115fe1657f76ff4a6976
Richard Feldman (Oct 17 2023 at 02:32):I figure it's something people will ask about
Richard Feldman (Oct 17 2023 at 02:32):not sure if it would make more sense as a FAQ entry?
Richard Feldman (Oct 17 2023 at 02:33):as a FAQ entry it wouldn't be in first person, for better or worse
Luke Boswell (Oct 17 2023 at 03:01):I think it is a valuable addition and gives clear direction and authority regarding decisions. Sets the tone, expectations that people are welcome etc. I would suggest a heading like "Leadership" and putting on this page https://www.roc-lang.org/wip/community.html
Sky Rose (Oct 17 2023 at 12:24):My day job has a policy of no FAQs in website content, cuz FAQ's are hard to find information in and they indicate that you should have organized everything else better, and I think I agree in this case. (The Community page does seem like a good organized place for this.)
Brendan Hansknecht (Oct 17 2023 at 14:38):I have seen bad FAQs, but I don't think I would ever conclude something like that. FAQs can be wonderfully helpful and searchable.
Anton (Oct 17 2023 at 15:05):I can see both sides. If you spread information over "themed" pages you need to rely on a search engine to get a user their answer but you avoid massive pages to get lost in. With an faq page you have nearly all information in one place but you need to rely on ctrl+F or a provided search functionality, which are typically worse than a search engine.
ABuffSeagull (Oct 18 2023 at 03:30):So considering the optimize.sh script, it turns out that harfbuzz has an hb-subset command in some extra packages (libharfbuzz-bin on Ubuntu, harfbuzz-subset on Alpine, etc). This actually works really well, but only on .ttf files. I've tried decompressing the .woff2 files, but there must be something that gets lost in the original compression, cause it just won't work.
Would this be a good path to go down? I'm not sure how to guarantee that package is installed (I'm not used to Nix). I think it would work best if the original .ttf files were hosted in the assets repo and generate the compressed fonts off of them.
Some other thoughts I have:
.woff files are needed, .woff2 has basically full supportsed command, I'm sure). Actually I may have answered myself, it shouldn't be that hard Anton (Oct 18 2023 at 08:31):The harfbuzz package is available on nix, if you mention me on your eventual PR, I'll add it in the right place :)
ABuffSeagull (Oct 19 2023 at 03:34):PR open https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/pull/5918
Richard Feldman (Oct 19 2023 at 10:24):excellent, thank you so much for making this happen! :grinning:
ABuffSeagull (Oct 21 2023 at 15:35):Of course! I'm very excited for this language and I definitely want to help, but web dev is about all I know
Richard Feldman (Oct 22 2023 at 02:31):@ABuffSeagull that's awesome, web dev is super helpful right now!
Richard Feldman (Oct 22 2023 at 02:33):actually there's a bug I'd love help tracking down right now: if you load the new wip website (README for how to build it there's a bug where after the web repl loads (a bit down the page), it scrolls the page down to it.
I thought it would be a quick fix of removing autofocus from that element, or in repl.js disabling the .focus() or .scrollTo() calls, but I tried taking all of those out and that didn't solve it - so definitely seems to be a nontrivial web dev bug to figure out! :big_smile:
Richard Feldman (Oct 22 2023 at 02:34):I worked some more on the homepage - here's the new stuff above the web repl...any feedback welcome!
dark mode:
Screenshot-2023-10-21-at-10.30.53-PM.png
light mode:
Screenshot-2023-10-21-at-10.29.48-PM.png
mobile:
Screenshot-2023-10-21-at-10.30.18-PM.png
Richard Feldman (Oct 22 2023 at 02:36):right below this will be the web repl, followed by a bigger code example
Anton (Oct 23 2023 at 09:55):Looks good! I like the style for the fast,friendly, functional boxes. Some nits:
Declan Joseph Maguire (Oct 23 2023 at 10:03):Really like it! However, I feel the boxes on mobile are overly big? Yes it's easy to tap on, but it can become so low density that you have to scroll tons and that feels bad.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Oct 23 2023 at 10:03):Of course density is always a tricky one in web design
Anton (Oct 23 2023 at 10:08):I feel the boxes on mobile are overly big?
True, it might be good to make them the same width as the code box, at least on mobile.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Oct 23 2023 at 10:11):Maybe have the text within the boxes wrap around the purple titles when there's only 1 to a row? The header/body/link structure works fine when you can see many boxes but it becomes annoyingly spread out when reading what is effectively a list.
Brendan Hansknecht (Oct 23 2023 at 14:40):I think that I'm not a fan of the dark mode green. That said it does have quite good contrast
Anton (Oct 23 2023 at 14:51):It does have that old school terminal vibe :)
Brendan Hansknecht (Oct 23 2023 at 14:53):I think my preferred old school terminal color is amber. Not that it would fit the site.
Richard Feldman (Oct 31 2023 at 16:20):I posted some updates to the WIP homepage last night. Still some todos:
Richard Feldman (Oct 31 2023 at 16:21):any feedback welcome!
Elias Mulhall (Oct 31 2023 at 19:05):
Luke Boswell (Oct 31 2023 at 19:08):Have you any ideas for the Examples site? I think it would be good to also have those available with the new site. I thought we had those as a link in the navbar at one point. At the moment there isn't anywhere you can see them in their rendered glory.
Luke Boswell (Oct 31 2023 at 19:10):The Tutorial content also needs to be moved across in full. That should be a matter of copying the remaining markdown. I guess one the new site is live we can then remove the tutorial from the current location.
Luke Boswell (Oct 31 2023 at 19:13):On the Install page, we could add a little more content e.g. to describe the nightlies or editor support status.
Richard Feldman (Oct 31 2023 at 19:13):Luke Boswell said:
Have you any ideas for the Examples site? I think it would be good to also have those available with the new site. I thought we had those as a link in the navbar at one point. At the moment there isn't anywhere you can see them in their rendered glory.
Yeah I couldn't fit all the links we had in the nav bar on mobile, and that was the one I decided to remove.
I'm up for putting them on the homepage though!
Richard Feldman (Oct 31 2023 at 19:15):Elias Mulhall said:
my expectation would be for the entire info card to be clickable
that's a great idea, love it! :smiley:
Luke Boswell (Oct 31 2023 at 19:15):It might be worth removing the Language Reference header on Community page for now. I had grand ambition to write that and move the relevant content out of the tutorial, but I guess it can stay there for now.
Richard Feldman (Oct 31 2023 at 19:16):yeah I definitely want that to exist, but probably not soon :big_smile:
Luke Boswell (Oct 31 2023 at 19:16):Or even better. Leave a note saying coming soon, or help write this section - drop is a message in zulip??
Bryce Miller (Oct 31 2023 at 19:40):Looking good folks!
Luke Boswell (Oct 31 2023 at 20:02):I can spend some time on this today if there is anything @Richard Feldman you would like assistance with. Maybe adding the fast/friendly/functional links if you are happy with those gists you shared previously? I could also try adding examples to the build script and front page.
Richard Feldman (Oct 31 2023 at 20:02):yeah adding those links would be great!
Richard Feldman (Oct 31 2023 at 20:02):I have the .md files checked in, they just need to actually exist and have some styling
Luke Boswell (Oct 31 2023 at 20:04):We can change the '''elm to '''roc too :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
Isaac Van Doren (Nov 01 2023 at 02:40):Looks awesome! :tada:
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 01 2023 at 07:16):I love the embedded REPL concept. Looking at it on my laptop, it doesn't immediately read as interactable though. I glance at it and think it's a screenshot or other static element. Maybe a small blinking cursor would help, or similar? I think I'm also having this reaction because I need to scroll a page before seeing it, so it feels like an anonymous block in the middle of a page which I've been trained to scroll past.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 01 2023 at 07:18):I haven't checked them all, but do any of the links still lead to dead pages? I get it's nice to have them there so they'll work once implemented, but I find it rough when looking for useful links, seeming to find them, only to discover on click they don't exist.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 01 2023 at 07:23):The Install Roc page is a tad rough. Having the first half of a dotpoint list be listing problems, and the second half links, is pretty odd. Maybe add some notes about how OS support is expected to evolve?
Luke Boswell (Nov 01 2023 at 10:04):Declan Joseph Maguire said:
I haven't checked them all, but do any of the links still lead to dead pages? I get it's nice to have them there so they'll work once implemented, but I find it rough when looking for useful links, seeming to find them, only to discover on click they don't exist.
If you find any please leave a comment. There shouldn't be too many left lying around.
Luke Boswell (Nov 01 2023 at 10:06):Declan Joseph Maguire said:
The Install Roc page is a tad rough. Having the first half of a dotpoint list be listing problems, and the second half links, is pretty odd. Maybe add some notes about how OS support is expected to evolve?
The intent is to flesh this out into content. That hasn't happened yet, so what you are seeing is the skeleton without it's bones. :bones:
Luke Boswell (Nov 01 2023 at 10:08):If anyone feels like writing some markdown summarising the Editor Support status for Roc that would be helpful.
Luke Boswell (Nov 01 2023 at 10:08):Or brief summary of how Roc manages nightlies
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 01 2023 at 10:18):Luke Boswell said:
The intent is to flesh this out into content. That hasn't happened yet, so what you are seeing is the skeleton without it's bones. :bones:
Wasn't sure how close-to-done the wip was meant to be. Good to know!
Luke Boswell (Nov 01 2023 at 10:23):All good, its easy to lose track of these things. I had forgotten about that page, and haven't looked at it in a while. Needs some love for sure.
Anton (Nov 01 2023 at 12:04):I'm not a fan of the text shadow on fast/friendly/fun.
I also agree with this.
I preferred the previous version of border and shadow on the fast, friendly, and functional boxes. As well as the previous borderless code boxes.
The separator lines under the titles draw a lot of attention, I would try something more subtle, perhaps something similar to on the foundation website.
I think there would be good value in having centered install and tutorial links (vertically and horizontally) in the initial page, because I expect a lot of users would want to go there upon visiting the site. "get started" also stands out a lot on the rust website.
A few tweaks away from a top tier website :)
Richard Feldman (Nov 01 2023 at 23:56):without the box shadows - I like this! :thumbs_up:
Screenshot-2023-11-01-at-9.42.15-PM.png
Screenshot-2023-11-01-at-9.42.34-PM.png
Richard Feldman (Nov 01 2023 at 23:57):the reason for the text-shadow outline effect is legibility; here it is without that:
Screenshot-2023-11-01-at-7.57.05-PM.png
Richard Feldman (Nov 01 2023 at 23:59):other potential ways to address the legibility problem:
Screenshot-2023-11-01-at-7.58.44-PM.png
Screenshot-2023-11-01-at-7.58.18-PM.png
Richard Feldman (Nov 02 2023 at 00:00):the reason I moved away from the purple outlines is that I like how the logo draws the eye more when it's the only big chunk of purple on the page - especially nice because that's about where your eye should start to read the page (and then move down from there)
Richard Feldman (Nov 02 2023 at 00:05):subtler lines underneath the headings:
Screenshot-2023-11-01-at-8.03.35-PM.png
Screenshot-2023-11-01-at-8.05.06-PM.png
Richard Feldman (Nov 02 2023 at 01:26):Declan Joseph Maguire said:
I love the embedded REPL concept. Looking at it on my laptop, it doesn't immediately read as interactable though. I glance at it and think it's a screenshot or other static element. Maybe a small blinking cursor would help, or similar? I think I'm also having this reaction because I need to scroll a page before seeing it, so it feels like an anonymous block in the middle of a page which I've been trained to scroll past.
unfortunately if we give it a real cursor (that is, focus it), the browser will auto-scroll down to it - and also it'll capture your down arrow so it won't scroll, so I don't think we can really do that. If we give a fake blinking cursor, I think people might be confused and try to start typing, only to find that it doesn't actually have focus. :sweat_smile:
Richard Feldman (Nov 02 2023 at 01:47):Anton said:
I think there would be good value in having centered install and tutorial links (vertically and horizontally) in the initial page, because I expect a lot of users would want to go there upon visiting the site. "get started" also stands out a lot on the rust website.
I thought this too at first, but the more I thought about it the less I liked the idea, at least at this stage in the language's progress.
If someone's level of interest in the language is so low that the difference between their actually trying it and not trying it is whether we have a prominent call-to-action button (when the first 2 nav links at the top of the page are "tutorial" and "install" - not difficult to find), I think they're likely to bounce off the language's current level of polish anyway. :big_smile:
Anton (Nov 03 2023 at 19:14):If someone's level of interest in the language is so low that the difference between their actually trying it and not trying it is whether we have a prominent call-to-action button (when the first 2 nav links at the top of the page are "tutorial" and "install" - not difficult to find), I think they're likely to bounce off the language's current level of polish anyway.
It indeed seems unlikely to make a difference in people actually trying roc, which is why it seems like unnecessary friction to leave it like this. We improve user-friendliness all over the roc ecosystem, I dislike delivering a subpar first experience here, even if it's on purpose.
The most logical approach seems to be to start with minimal friction, and add friction if we notice lots of "shallow" users .
Two large centralized buttons also come with an accessibility improvement, especially on mobile.
Interesting side-note; I visited the zig website about 15 times before I noticed the "GET STARTED" button.
Richard Feldman (Nov 03 2023 at 20:19):so to elaborate a bit, I think of this in terms of UX for different personas:
That said, I could see an argument for putting some additional get started and/or install links further down the page, e.g. after you finish reading a particular section of the homepage (like "Use Cases" maybe), if you're now sufficiently persuaded that you'd like to actually try the language, we can make it easier to take the next step so you don't need to scroll back up to the nav bar
Richard Feldman (Nov 03 2023 at 20:36):all that said, I wonder if a "get started" button underneath the code snippet might be unobtrusive enough
Ayaz Hafiz (Nov 03 2023 at 23:36):couple of notes re mobile:
Ayaz Hafiz (Nov 03 2023 at 23:40):Id also suggest linking the larger example early on (though not lifting it up, just a link like “See this interactive example of a Roc program!”). The vast majority of visitors are likely to be individuals that haven’t heard of Roc, and I think the description in the larger example may leave a stronger first impression that the small code block at the top, which could be seen as “yet another ML”, or the non-visual goals in the following three blocks
Ayaz Hafiz (Nov 03 2023 at 23:44):This feedback might just be a personal thing, but I don't think that the italics on fast/friendly/functional are giving the impact they seem to want to give? Looking at it, it seems to me de-italicizing and capitalizing instead looks a bit better. But this is bikeshedding.
Ayaz Hafiz (Nov 03 2023 at 23:47):I have no clue whether this is difficult or not to fix, and if it's difficult probably not worth it, but the text area for the repl looks like it has its focus border unaligned with the outer box, and also you can stretch it outside the box, which looks funny
image.png
Ayaz Hafiz (Nov 03 2023 at 23:49):The font in the hoverable larger example code section is different from the font in the rest of the document - again a nitpick but it might be nice if it's consistent
image.png
Ayaz Hafiz (Nov 03 2023 at 23:50):I'm not sure how pro/averse you are embedding the Monaco editor into the website, Richard, but if you are not opposed to it, we could even update that larger-hover-example to both use the language server so you can hover on type, and have the existing functionality you have now
ABuffSeagull (Nov 04 2023 at 00:21):So for making the REPL look interactive, maybe make the little caret (or whatever it's called) move around a bit.
For instance, taking the bounce from TailwindCSS and making it horizontal, until you focus on it.
#source-input-wrapper:not(:focus-within)::before {
animation: bounce 1s infinite;
}
@keyframes bounce {
0%, 100% {
transform: translateX(-25%);
animation-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.8, 0, 1, 1);
}
50% {
transform: translateX(0);
animation-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0, 0, 0.2, 1);
}
}
I really would rather not use an animation to draw attention to something...I think that's too much :sweat_smile:
Richard Feldman (Nov 04 2023 at 01:23):love the suggestions @Ayaz Hafiz , thanks! :tada:
Ayaz Hafiz said:
I'm not sure how pro/averse you are embedding the Monaco editor into the website, Richard, but if you are not opposed to it, we could even update that larger-hover-example to both use the language server so you can hover on type, and have the existing functionality you have now
making the code editable seems like an interesting idea to revisit in the future, but I don't want to bring that into scope for this release (which needs to ship in 1-2 weeks for the Advent of Code timeline).
for this release, my main goals for that example are:
Ayaz Hafiz (Nov 04 2023 at 01:28):yeah, i understand. just a comment, i don't think it's actionable
Anton (Nov 04 2023 at 10:24):I love the de-italicized, capitalized version :)
That also fixes the "The fonts for the colored fast, friendly, functional titles are very rounded, which looks a bit off against all the sharp corners we have in the rest of the design." I raised earlier.
Anton (Nov 04 2023 at 10:38):Instead of the centered "tutorial" and "install" buttons, I think it would be good to make the header links stand out more, they currently don't draw attention. I believe a very short centered rectangle at the bottom of each header button could work well. For that rectangle, I would go with the same height and color as used under the subtitles for a nice consistent design.
Brian Carroll (Nov 04 2023 at 10:47):Just had a look on mobile. I'd second Ayaz' point about the hover boxes at the bottom of the page. Once you open a box you can't close it again except by tapping on another line of code. But you can't tap some of the lines because they are covered by the box itself. It's hard to uncover the first few lines in particular. One quick solution could be to add an X to close the modal.
Richard Feldman (Nov 04 2023 at 10:50):yeah that part is just unfinished - I haven't figured out what design would be nicest. Adding an X to close it seems fine, although I'd like to try to preserve the context of the line somehow (maybe having the box appear right below the line it's describing, instead of covering it?)
Brian Carroll (Nov 04 2023 at 11:40):Richard Feldman said:
yeah that part is just unfinished
Ah ok cool.
Yes preserving that context sounds like a good idea.
Isaac Van Doren (Nov 04 2023 at 21:14):I just noticed that there isn't a link back to the home page on the website. Of course you can just use the back button but I would have expected there to be one
Richard Feldman (Nov 04 2023 at 21:26):there isn't on the homepage (just because I thought it looked weird to have a big purple bird with a much smaller purple bird right above it), but there should be on the other pages
Isaac Van Doren (Nov 04 2023 at 21:27):Ah yeah I see that now
Richard Feldman (Nov 09 2023 at 03:15):I tried adding links to the tutorial and installation and they still feel too distracting to me :sweat_smile:
Screenshot-2023-11-08-at-10.14.47-PM.png
Screenshot-2023-11-08-at-10.14.23-PM.png
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 09 2023 at 03:36):I think if you bring the logo left and down it would look fine
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 09 2023 at 03:37):Oh, I miss understood what you added. I see now
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 09 2023 at 03:37):Though my comment still applies, I think the wing being over the top purple bar seems strange
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 09 2023 at 03:38):Also, I think the tutorial and install links aren't needed cause you have the in the top bar
Isaac Van Doren (Nov 09 2023 at 04:19):Though my comment still applies, I think the wing being over the top purple bar seems strange
I actually really like that it overlaps. I think it makes the page pop
Isaac Van Doren (Nov 09 2023 at 04:19):I agree that it's too noisy with the extra links
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 09 2023 at 10:50):I think the issue with the bird is a lack of colour contrast between it and the header. Also, what if instead of putting links under the example, we put all three links next to each other in the header and give them a colour that pops from the rest, perhaps with "install" being somehow extra emphasised. I'm not sure the best way to do that, as it might risk getting overly busy and fail to form a visual hierarchy, but I think it's doable. I feel like I should be able to confidently identify the install link even from these thumbnails even when it's too small to read.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 09 2023 at 10:54):If you use the same order in the header as you have under the boxes, a differently-coloured "install" link would also serve to separate the block of 3 from the others and also partly center it over the boxes, helping link them visually.
Anton (Nov 10 2023 at 09:45):Yeah, that could work.
I feel like I should be able to confidently identify the install link even from these thumbnails even when it's too small to read.
This is indeed an important UI/UX concept.
Anton (Nov 10 2023 at 09:48):The logo over the header is a nice touch but no similar overlapping elements are seen in other places in the design, which can make it feel a bit off.
Anton (Nov 10 2023 at 09:52):With the centered links the page is now too dense. We could keep the links there and change up the design of the fast... boxes, so they are not shown side-by-side, all three at once. Or, go back to the previous design and add some color to the header buttons.
Richard Feldman (Nov 10 2023 at 11:56):of course another UX concept is that emphasizing one thing necessarily de-emphasizes everything else. I'm still not convinced that emphasizing "install" is the right move at this stage in the language's development, because I expect the overwhelming majority of visitors to the homepage will be there to learn about the language first, not to jump straight to installing it.
I do think "install" should be easy to find, but I also think it is easy to find right now. If I'm a return visitor to this page, I immediately know all the content on the page below the nav bar is informational, and I'm not returning for information, so I'm just going to look at the nav bar. And it's the second link in the nav bar.
I appreciate that it would be an even better UX for return visitors (who are, say, installing roc for a second time) to make the install link very prominent, but that necessarily comes at the cost of drawing the attention (in other words, distracting) the people who are visiting for the first time, who I think will be the overwhelming majority of visitors right now :big_smile:
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 10 2023 at 12:03):I think that could be handled by delicately chosing the relevant colours and/or other methods of emphasis, but of course that might be quite delicate in the face of other issues. Certainly I'd want the visual prominence to be less than the main body.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 10 2023 at 12:11):And given the current low priority of install as an action we want people to take, it might make sense then to have install be the same emphasis as tutorial and examples, and then you don't have the same issue with too many layers of emphasis to clearly grok.
Also, a thought, what if you had donate and install on the right side, and the other header links on the left? Tutorial, Examples, Docs, and Community are all thematically linked, and Install and Donate also feel linked to me. Then you could bump the bird to the center as it's nestled near the negative space right of the title.
Also, what's that story, about choosing the colour to paint the shed?
Anton (Nov 10 2023 at 12:15):... Then you could bump the bird to the center ...
That could work, but it also seems quite unconventional, which is something best avoided when it comes to UX.
Anton (Nov 10 2023 at 12:17):It could be argued that the header stands out enough in dark mode, but it does seem too little in light mode.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 10 2023 at 12:55):Anton said:
... Then you could bump the bird to the center ...
That could work, but it also seems quite unconventional, which is something best avoided when it comes to UX.
Yes, but it'd also be striking, which I think is a big bonus for helping people remember and recognise Roc and its logo. Plus, it doesn't affect any of the functional aspects of design, so I'd argue it's purely unconventional UI and wouldn't impact core UX.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 10 2023 at 13:03):You could even do something unique with the logo in the future, having it move separate from the rest of the site when you scroll, just a little bit to make it pop extra. Given how minimalist and simple the rest of the site is, having that one single solitary spot of animation (plus something to make the REPL look alive) might look super nice. If you did that though, you couldn't use it ANYWHERE else.
Richard Feldman (Nov 14 2023 at 20:50):can anyone with Windows verify that there's a horizontal scroll bar on the first code sample on the new homepage?
Richard Feldman (Nov 14 2023 at 20:51):apparently it looks like this but only seems to happen on Windows
Luke Boswell (Nov 14 2023 at 21:06):Not in Chrome
Luke Boswell (Nov 14 2023 at 21:06):Or Edge
Luke Boswell (Nov 14 2023 at 21:08):I do get this in edge though
image.png
Luke Boswell (Nov 14 2023 at 21:11):The X to close the code sample with instructions isn't working, and its clipping at the moment.
Richard Feldman (Nov 14 2023 at 21:19):hm, that should only appear on mobile (or mobile widths)
Richard Feldman (Nov 14 2023 at 21:19):yeah I do know about that scroll bar
Richard Feldman (Nov 14 2023 at 21:19):the one in the code example
Elias Mulhall (Nov 15 2023 at 16:31):yo this is great
Screenshot_2023-11-15_11-29-37.png
Richard Feldman (Nov 16 2023 at 06:37):ok, I just pushed more updates to the WIP homepage and it's now at a point that I'd be happy to ship it ("it" being just the homepage; at a minimum, the pages it links to still need more revisions before the new website is ready to ship!)
Richard Feldman (Nov 16 2023 at 06:38):(okay actually there are some changes I want to make to its internal structure for the benefit of screen readers, but those aren't blocking feedback on the rest of it)
Richard Feldman (Nov 16 2023 at 06:38):any feedback on the current homepage is welcome! I'm eager to move onto the other pages, which mostly need copy changes but probably little or no CSS or accessibility changes
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 16 2023 at 07:21):All on Mobile Android.
Navigation links feel weirdly spaced/shifted to the left:
Screenshot_20231115-231719.png
Repl input text wraps and is too close to the bottom
Screenshot_20231115-231733.png
List of sponsers is really dense and kinda hard to read especially in that color:
Screenshot_20231115-231825.png
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 16 2023 at 08:00):It looks damn nice. I'm on windows (and specifically firefox), and I've noticed a two visual bugs, first minor, second medium.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 16 2023 at 08:01):image.png
A small but noticable misalignment on the header bar, as though it were made of an outer rectangle and a slightly thicker middle rectangle
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 16 2023 at 08:02):It's reflected on the other side as well
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 16 2023 at 08:03):image.png
Second, the popups overlap the code even on my fairly large laptop screen, and they don't close when I click away. I have no way to close it, so I just have to find another line whose popup isn't blocking the code and click on it.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 16 2023 at 08:04):Aside from that, looks great on my machine, elegant, simple, slick.
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 03:23):ok, I've incorporated that feedback - thanks so much!
Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 03:27):Have those changes shifted all the content to the right? It's like there is a white space along the RHS of the page
Screenshot-2023-11-17-at-14.27.02.png
Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 03:28):Should the X close the light purple box on the Code Sample? seems to be working ok
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 03:29):what browser is this? I'm not seeing that :thinking:
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 03:29):yes it should, although the X should only be visible on mobile - are you seeing it on desktop?
Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 03:36):Safari
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 03:39):weird, this is what I see in Safari
Screenshot-2023-11-16-at-10.39.11-PM.png
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 03:39):Luke, what exactly is the issue with that picture? That the text in example doesn't use the full width?
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 03:39):I think that is on all browsers
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 03:39):the borders on the sides are asymmetrical
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 03:40):like here's what I see at that point:
Screenshot-2023-11-16-at-10.40.22-PM.png
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 03:41):random thoughts:
Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 03:42):I see the same as you
Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 03:43):It just stood out to me that the blue box takes full width and is centered, but the content stops half way
Screenshot-2023-11-17-at-14.42.56.png
Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 03:46):Brendan Hansknecht said:
Luke, what exactly is the issue with that picture? That the text in example doesn't use the full width?
The text wraps before the end of the line, like there is a large margin on the right for the <p> block. It may be deliberate, I'm just pointing it out that it looks strange to me
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 03:47):Luke Boswell said:
It just stood out to me that the blue box takes full width and is centered, but the content stops half way
ohhh that's intentional, to make things easier to read by not having such long lines before they wrap
Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 03:48):Ok :thumbs_up:
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 03:57):also, I just pushed updates to the 3 pages linked to by the fast, friendly, and functional sections of the WIP homepage - any feedback on those 3 pages welcome!
They're also now at a point where I'd be comfortable shipping them, so now's the time for feedback on how they come across!
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 05:36):also updated the pages behind the install, community, and donate nav bar links - so the only remaining ones to polish are tutorial, examples, and docs!
Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 05:44):I've read through FFF and homepage, they are looking really great. Good flow between the ideas, really easy to follow and understand. Looks really nice too.
Johan Lövgren (Nov 17 2023 at 06:39):I agree, looks and reads great
Johan Lövgren (Nov 17 2023 at 06:42):A small typographical nitpick: there are many occurrences of words “in quotes”, but you are using ", which is the inch symbol, not inverted commas (this is super common, though. I think I just reacted because there was several of them)
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 08:20):"... (It also works for encoding; there is an Encode.toBytes function which encodes similarly to how Decode.fromBytes decodes.)..."
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 08:22):This is on the "Friendly" page. The use of the word "similarly" is a bit jarring here. Am I meant to interpret this as referring to the algorithms, or the result? It seems to imply (or be open to the possibility) that there's no guarantee that encoding and decoding the same data will result in the original data, that they are only usually inverse functions.
Brian Carroll (Nov 17 2023 at 08:34):Similarly in that everything is inferred from the types in both cases.
Personally I don't see the implication about not being inverse.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 08:49):Oh I get the intended meaning and was 98% confident about it, but this seems like something that should be 100% confident and would just take minor rewording.
Brian Carroll (Nov 17 2023 at 09:07):Yeah it could probably be a bit more precise about what it means
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 09:09):I only brought it up because Richard wanted final feedback before launching
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 09:50):Also, in the "functional" section, I feel the word "flake" might do well with a link. Other than that, everything is excellent.
Anton (Nov 17 2023 at 10:41):Nice improvements!
I would say the Examples section is too dense (on Desktop) with all three side-by-side.
I still believe the header should stand out more in light mode than it does now.
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 12:47):One issues with the repl on that page is that every time i type the box gets larger a tiny bit
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 12:49):backspace also makes the box larger, I made a thicc box.
Screenshot-2023-11-17-054757.png
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 12:50):Thats a great site though, as a newcomer very straight to the point and good presentation. And it looks great aesthetically.
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 13:03):I have horrible eyes, but looking at the site in the dark does strain my eyes because the black is super dark compared to the bright cyan. Dark reader makes it a lot better for me. But I'm pretty sure it might just be me since it's a problem I have a lot.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 13:08):Is the darkness the problem, the vividness of the cyan, the contrast in brightness, or something more subtle about their relationship?
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 14:25):Specifically the value (HSV) of the background is too low. The cyan isn't too bad. Although I would prefer the violet there for a larger element, the cyan on the other elements is perfectly fine. But it might just be that my eyes are particularly bad or that the dark background is making the cyan strain more then it would normally.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 14:28):no need to apologise, this sort of stuff matters. I can imagine the background being bumped up one or two arbitrary units for value without being a problem. However, I know that some people have the exact inverse accessibility problem, needing the highest possible contrast. I wonder if there's a better universal solution?
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 14:28):I changed it from 6% to 8% and its a massive difference for me.
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 14:28):@Jacob want to make a PR for that? The CSS file in question is site.css and it's in the wip_new_website directory
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 14:30):https://contrastchecker.com/ can verify whether it's still a sufficient level of contrast according to WCAG AA guidelines
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 14:30):I think you can still have high contrast without a super dark background. I'm not sure if its a universal UI thing, but I remember material UI docs mentioning that slightly above too dark is better than too dark.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 14:30):If so, I don't think it needs to be included this very update, but if there's a standard accessibility toolkit for letting people set custom solutions. I heard that Musescore did some incredible stuff for accessible interfaces for their Musescore 4 release recently, and they're open source, but I don't know how generalisable that is to websites
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 14:33):Just because this is a totally new class of accessibility failure for me (and likely for some others), can you explain what the overdark background is like subjectively? I just find that sort of thing useful for remembering this stuff and making sure to pay attention in future for those who need it, so I'd love to have a sense of how it feels and what it's like.
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 14:34):Ok, I was playing with some colors and #151517 (value from 6% to 9%) makes the cyan way better for me. Also passes the accessibility contrast from that page you posted.
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 14:35):awesome! Are you ok with making a PR for it?
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 14:35):I'm not a UI person, so I could be entirely wrong. But I think too dark of backgrounds is generally bad? Except on OLED screens? I can try to see if there is any advice on this.
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 14:35):Sure!
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 14:35):sweet, thank you so much!
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 14:36):personally I prefer dark backgrounds that are lighter than #000 but I always assumed more contrast was better
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 14:36):so this fits with my general personal preference in addition to making it easier on your eyes :big_smile:
Anton (Nov 17 2023 at 14:44):But I think too dark of backgrounds is generally bad
Yeah, if I change my monitor settings to their defaults, it's also too black for me.
I remember having a custom a background color for my pdf reader when studying and then I would also avoid colors that are too dark.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 14:47):BTW this is me just talking about a cool thing I learned about, but there's this thing called OKLAB that's like, HSV but done better? HSV but equal numerical gaps correspond to (mostly) equal subjective perceptual gaps . Also the variables are properly orthogonal perceptually. I learned about it from the graphics space, but I wonder if it'd be useful for accessibility purposes.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 14:51):I see you rich. You're now obligated to make OKLAB a builtin somehow.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 14:52):It is declarèd thus.
Bryce Miller (Nov 17 2023 at 14:54):I think my contrast preferences for dark mode depend a lot on my monitor and ambient lighting.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 14:56):That's a good point Bryce. @Jacob , mind finding a good value that splits the diff between your needs and min constast standards? Ideally whatever value we choose shouldn't be overly sensitive to hardware.
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 15:01):I'd like to try it out with the version that looks good to Jacob - it's easy to deploy and see how it looks to others!
Bryce Miller (Nov 17 2023 at 15:08):Not sure how much it’s worth worrying about viewers’ hardware anyway. At a certain point it’s probably a fool’s errand. For professional video they just make sure it looks good on a n accurate calibrated display and then call it good.
Bryce Miller (Nov 17 2023 at 15:08):Worst case scenario we could add a high contrast theme down the road perhaps?
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 17 2023 at 15:14):I mean, we can still split the diff between max contrast and whatever is best for @Jacob . I'm not talking about "optimality" per se, just trying to find a happy medium.
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 15:23):we can, but I'd like to try it at "is comfortable for him and sufficient contrast" before splitting a difference (into something that's uncomfortable for him) that might not need to be split :big_smile:
Bryce Miller (Nov 17 2023 at 15:28):Unrelated, but I’m eyeing my calendar for an opportunity to do some work on the docs. No promises, but I’d love to help!
Elias Mulhall (Nov 17 2023 at 15:31):My main desire for the docs is to make the sidebar sticky. Whenever I use the builtin docs right now I navigate by either ctrl+f or typing the anchor link directly into the url.
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 15:32):hm, a challenge with that is: what if the list of docs is longer than your viewport height? How do you scroll to see the ones at the end if it's sticky? :sweat_smile:
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 15:32):also, have you tried the "press S to search" thing?
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 15:32):Ok, just before I submit the PR. I was playing with keeping the contrast the same (almost indiscernibly brightening text) with the WCAG website u posted. Or would u just prefer a minimal change?
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 15:33):Both pass the WCAG, so not sure if it really matters? EDIT: Just submitted PR, the difference is so tiny, that unless someone mentions it, probably fine to keep it where its at, don't want to be changing a bunch of colors!
Elias Mulhall (Nov 17 2023 at 15:34):Richard Feldman said:
hm, a challenge with that is: what if the list of docs is longer than your viewport height? How do you scroll to see the ones at the end if it's sticky? :sweat_smile:
As is frequently the case with tooling, I'd want to do it like Elixir does with Hexdocs. https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.Changeset.html
Elias Mulhall (Nov 17 2023 at 15:35):Richard Feldman said:
also, have you tried the "press S to search" thing?
I'll be real I've noticed it many times and only just tried it. The fact that it jumps you back to the top is nice.
Richard Feldman (Nov 17 2023 at 15:37):Elias Mulhall said:
Richard Feldman said:
hm, a challenge with that is: what if the list of docs is longer than your viewport height? How do you scroll to see the ones at the end if it's sticky? :sweat_smile:
As is frequently the case with tooling, I'd want to do it like Elixir does with Hexdocs. https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.Changeset.html
interesting, so separate scroll bar for the navigation...I generally default to "one scroll bar per page" but I can see the argument in this case.
I'm up for trying that layout! Curious what others think.
Bryce Miller (Nov 17 2023 at 15:39):The separate scroll bar occurred to me. Had to know without trying it while I’m busy building something, but I could see it potentially being frustrating to have to move my cursor over the sidebar to scroll it. But maybe it would be fine!
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 15:39):Jacob said:
Specifically the value (HSV) of the background is too low. The cyan isn't too bad. Although I would prefer the violet there for a larger element, the cyan on the other elements is perfectly fine. But it might just be that my eyes are particularly bad or that the dark background is making the cyan strain more then it would normally.
Not that it's particularly relevant at this point, but I hit this all the time
Bryce Miller (Nov 17 2023 at 15:41):Another thing we could try (instead of or in addition to scrolling sidebar) is collapsing the module sections when JS is enabled.
Bryce Miller (Nov 17 2023 at 15:42):Not sure whether that’s a good idea.
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 15:42):Are the Rust and Zig docs double scrollbars the same thing that you're mentioning?
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 15:45):rust is
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 15:45):zig main tutorial like doc page is, not standard library docs
Jacob (Nov 17 2023 at 15:46):Yeah I just saw, the std auto generated docs dont automatically add anything to the guide.
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 15:46):yeah the std docs are search and then ctrl+f driven
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 15:49):I have rarely even though about the fact that the rust docs have a second scroll (maybe because for most modules it doesn't), They aggregate all of the links together at the bottom of the page to generally avoid too long of a side bar
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 15:51):I say that then immediately have a bad experience with one of their pages with a double scroll bar. Apparently the smaller side menu scroll bar only works in firefox when the page is in focus. So I tried to scroll the side menu while this chat was in focus and instead it scrolled the main page. That is not optimial.
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 15:54):For the code exmaple pages on the website, like https://www.roc-lang.org/wip/examples/PatternMatching/README.html, does it lazy load the code as you scroll? Cause it seems to have an issue for me with code not rendering until I click on it. Like I see it loading in chunks as I scroll, but the last chunk never loads unless I click.
Elias Mulhall (Nov 17 2023 at 15:55):From a UI perspective double scrollbar is a bit awkward. I also think it would require some deeper style changes to not look ugly with the current docs layout.
I think the main upside is that I can be reading one part of the docs in the main panel and then look at some other stuff in the sidebar without losing my place. That can be nice when I'm thinking through a problem and kind of know what I want to look at next, but don't want to fully commit to a jump.
Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 19:03):@Brendan Hansknecht the examples should just be static HTML
Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 19:03):So it should load the whole page in one go
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 19:08): Luke Boswell (Nov 17 2023 at 19:08):Bryce Miller said:
Another thing we could try (instead of or in addition to scrolling sidebar) is collapsing the module sections when JS is enabled.
I think this is a good idea. When I open the docs on my mobile I have like 15seconds of scrolling through the module navbar before I get to the content of the index page. If we collapse it would just be the module names instead of also having every single function as a nav link
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 17 2023 at 19:10):Maybe the issue is that it isn't just text. Instead it is a metric ton of spans to get code formatting and color. So firefox lazy loads it. On top of that, it kinda fails and thus the behavior in the video.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 18 2023 at 01:32):Richard Feldman said:
we can, but I'd like to try it at "is comfortable for him and sufficient contrast" before splitting a difference (into something that's uncomfortable for him) that might not need to be split :big_smile:
Whoops I misspoke. I meant to was something like find the middle of the overlap between his needs re: overdark BG vs the high contrast. Still satisfying both with some extra wiggle room so that changes won't cause issues.
Richard Feldman (Nov 18 2023 at 17:26):ok, now all the links on https://www.roc-lang.org/wip should be ready to launch except for the tutorial (which I'll be revising today and tomorrow) - so if anyone has any feedback on any pages other than the tutorial, now's the time! :smiley:
Anton (Nov 18 2023 at 19:02):I'm making issues for some minor things
Richard Feldman (Nov 18 2023 at 19:02):cool, thanks!
Anton (Nov 18 2023 at 19:18):In the examples on the home page we mention "platform" twice. Should we make that a link to a page on the website with an explanation?
Richard Feldman (Nov 18 2023 at 19:19):yeah I'd like to, although I don't know where to link to right now. Maybe I can make a quick page for it for now, and in the future that can be a language reference entry.
Anton (Nov 18 2023 at 19:23):Sounds good :+1:
Eli Dowling (Nov 18 2023 at 22:13):ABuffSeagull said:
Richard Feldman said:
- there's some way to minimize fonts based on actual content - e.g. strip out the glyphs that don't come up in any of our .html files - I don't know what the name of the tool is that does it, but since we serve our own fonts and have all the content in static .html files, we should be able to do that too!
The tool you're looking for is a font subsetter. If you don't mind doing it manually, this online tool is my usual goto. I still haven't found a good CLI tool to do it, only this library is the easiest/closest thing to what I want, but I also haven't really looked outside the JS ecosystem.
I actually wrote a tool for subsetting fontawesome for use at my last job:
https://github.com/faldor20/symbolswinger it creates a list of non-standard symbols in a html document that you can feed to a tool that can subset the font.
I used this to do the actual subsetting:
https://fonttools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subset/index.html
might be of some use to you :)
--Just realised this was months ago, zulip just dumped me there and i didn't notice the date :sweat_smile:
John Murray (Nov 18 2023 at 22:55):Not sure if this is know but was playing around with the repl on the WIP page and did a typo of
» 0.1 + 0,2
panicked at 'not yet implemented: unhandled parse error: Pattern(IndentEnd(@82), @81)', crates/reporting/src/error/parse.rs:673:14
Stack:
after that the repl wouldnt print new expressions
Luke Boswell (Nov 18 2023 at 22:58):Can you log an issue for this so we can track it? Issue with parsing and should print a nice error
Elias Mulhall (Nov 18 2023 at 23:11):Does it break the repl on other panic cases, like number overflow?
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 18 2023 at 23:52):This is an actual rust panic, so I think it is different from a roc panic. Though a roc panic may also break the repl, not sure
Luke Boswell (Nov 19 2023 at 00:27):I know we got rid of the CLI commands etc from the Docs page.
But I still really think it would be super helpful to have at least something minimal there for common use cases. I have only stumbled across these over time, and I know they are in roc help but it wasn't obvious to me.
Some ideas;
roc replroc check - really helpful when you have type annotationsroc formatroc dev myapp.roc and roc run myapp.roc and roc myapp.rocroc testroc build --optimizeroc build --debugroc run --timeroc run --linker=legacyroc docsroc glue /path/to/glue/spec.roc /platform/glue /platform/main.roc Richard Feldman (Nov 19 2023 at 06:14):ok, tutorial now works on /wip except on mobile (there's a problem there I need to fix)
Richard Feldman (Nov 19 2023 at 06:16):@Luke Boswell let's revisit that after launch...I'm open to the idea in some form but it doesn't seem like a blocker
Brian Carroll (Nov 19 2023 at 11:13):Regarding the REPL panic mentioned above - the web REPL is supposed to gracefully handle Rust panics or Roc panics and keep going. They should not break the page. That was the case before we added the state machine for handling definitions, so I suspect that's what breaks.
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 19 2023 at 11:49):Hey, another thing I noticed on my windows machine on firefox - spellchecker was active in the REPL when I tried it today, but I don't remember this happening last time (maybe I was unobservant). Kinda weird, feels bad. I don't want my spellchecker to yell at me because I named a function likeThis.
Anton (Nov 19 2023 at 12:00):Can you file an issue for that @Declan Joseph Maguire?
Declan Joseph Maguire (Nov 19 2023 at 12:09):Gladly. Where would I do that for the website?
Anton (Nov 19 2023 at 12:11):Everything for the website is also in the main roc repo https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/issues
Elias Mulhall (Nov 19 2023 at 21:14):Website is looking really good. Right now many of the pages are using max-width: 720px; for the body, and that's kind of rough on the examples sub-pages. Many of the code snippets require horizontal scrolling to figure out what's going on. Using max-width: var(--body-max-width); helps a good deal, but I'm not sure if we want that on every page.
Richard Feldman (Nov 19 2023 at 21:16):hm, yeah maybe we should apply that width to p but not pre on examples pages? :thinking:
Richard Feldman (Nov 19 2023 at 21:16):I for sure prefer the limited width on paragraphs of text
Luke Boswell (Nov 19 2023 at 22:12):Also just noticed we still need to fix the instructions at the start of the tutorial instead of saying val1. I can look at it after work later.
Luke Boswell (Nov 19 2023 at 22:16):Also the text input on REPL in light mode is barely visible
Screenshot-2023-11-20-at-09.16.14.png
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 19 2023 at 22:44):web repl does not like binding the same variable twice. try entering x = 1 twice in a row.
Elias Mulhall (Nov 19 2023 at 22:51):It seems like a number of invalid cases are crashing. X = 1 also breaks
Richard Feldman (Nov 19 2023 at 22:55):yeah neither of those are quick fixes unfortunately
Richard Feldman (Nov 19 2023 at 22:55):the text color is easy, I'll fix that tonight
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 04:32):I wrote up some docs for platforms (no diagrams yet, but can incorporate some later!) so people have something to read tomorrow: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/0a0edb59d791937c8974702225e55a670c71ba42/www/wip_new_website/content/platforms.md
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 04:32):any feedback welcome!
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 20 2023 at 05:41):Roc-Platform-To-Binary-Inline-Dark.svg
Roc-Platform-To-Binary-Inline-Light.svg
I changed this to be inline, here are the generated light and dark mode svgs from my images earlier
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 20 2023 at 05:42):Hopefully one of those works for something you could put on the site and color as you want.
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 05:44):awesome, thank you!
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 20 2023 at 05:45):This back and forth I think makes it harder to read:
A Roc game engine platform might provide functionality for rendering and sound, whereas a Web server platform probably would not.
A Roc Web server platform (like basic-webserver) might provide functionality for managing incoming HTTP requests, which a game engine platform likely would not. (It might, however, offer non-HTTP networking functionality for multiplayer games.)
I think it would be better to make one bullet point just game engine. Then the next only webservers (maybe with a start like a webserver platform on the the other hand would not have any rendering or sound capabities, but would ...). I think it is a bit strange to go game, web, web, game in such a small space.
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 20 2023 at 05:45):Applies to the 3rd bullet point also jumping back to games after talking about gui
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 20 2023 at 05:48):relatedly, I thInk the ecosystem benefits section covers the same thing more or less.
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 20 2023 at 05:51):Not a fan of the multiple platform section. I think it should give a more direct answer. As it is written currently, it almost feels like it is belittling the reader.
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 20 2023 at 05:54):This design has security benefits, ecosystem benefits, and performance benefits, and the domain-specific memory management platforms can implement can offer additional benefits as well.
Maybe instead something like:
This design has security benefits, ecosystem benefits, and performance benefits. On top of that, the opportunity for domain-specific memory management offers additional potential gains.
Brendan Hansknecht (Nov 20 2023 at 05:55):if you'd like to create a platform is to say hi in the #beginners channel on Roc Zulip!
Is it worth mentioning #Writing a platform instead?
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 07:35):hm, unfortunately the diagram gets super small in the context of that page's width :sweat_smile:
Screenshot-2023-11-20-at-2.34.38-AM.png
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 07:35):I think we can ship it as just text for now and revisit figuring out how to get a diagram in there sometime after launch
Eli Dowling (Nov 20 2023 at 07:44):Richard Feldman said:
I wrote up some docs for platforms (no diagrams yet, but can incorporate some later!) so people have something to read tomorrow: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/0a0edb59d791937c8974702225e55a670c71ba42/www/wip_new_website/content/platforms.md
In the applications heading I think it would be helpful explicitly state how the code works eg:
" In the example above we reference the platform in the packages header and assign it to pfackages { pf: ".."}. We then specify the features we want to import from the platformimports [pf.Stdout], and we define the entry point the platform should use to start executing our code. provides [main] to pf"
alternatively you could use comments in the code block
app "hello"
#Reference the platform in the packages header and assign it to 'pf'
packages { pf: "https://github.com/roc-lang/basic-cli/releases/download/0.5.0/Cufzl36_SnJ4QbOoEmiJ5dIpUxBvdB3NEySvuH82Wio.tar.br" }
#Specify the features we want to import from the platform
imports [pf.Stdout]
#Define the entry point the platform should use to start executing our code. In this case it will be the 'main' expression below
provides [main] to pf
main =
Stdout.line "Hello, World!"
Additionally one major question I had when finishing my read through was "What about code that's portable across platforms?" like say i wrote a library for logging and i want to use it in my cli application and my webserver, can i do that?
Say i make a cli application and then at some point i realize i wan to expose a http endpoint for some reason, what do i do?
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 13:21):https://lobste.rs/s/lskhwr/roc_programming_language#c_gq5zyn
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 13:23):And then I scroll down and… a repl? OMG. Yes.
nice work @Brian Carroll! :smiley:
Brian Carroll (Nov 20 2023 at 13:28):Oh very cool. Nice work to you too, the site is looking great! Lovely to have such positive reactions from people.
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 13:29):also thanks to @Luke Boswell, @Anton , and @Brendan Hansknecht for making this happen!!! :heart_eyes:
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 14:53):
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 14:54):will this be Roc's equivalent of "I thought this was going to be about the email client"? :laughing:
Screenshot-2023-11-20-at-9.53.43-AM.png
Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 15:07): Richard Feldman (Nov 20 2023 at 15:30):Netlify dashboard right now
Screenshot-2023-11-20-at-10.29.30-AM.png
Matthew Phillips (Nov 20 2023 at 20:15):Congrats on the website release!
Brian Carroll (Nov 20 2023 at 20:22):On the tutorial page, did we ever discuss adding position: sticky to the table of contents, or putting it in a sidebar? It might be nice to be able to jump around more easily. I know I've done that a lot on the equivalent Zig page (where they have a separately-scrolling sidebar)
Richard Feldman (Nov 21 2023 at 02:33):the challenge with sticky is that if your window height is too small to show the whole ToC, then you can't possibly scroll to see the bottom entries anymore :sweat_smile:
Richard Feldman (Nov 21 2023 at 02:34):we discussed multiple scrollbars somewhere earlier (I forget if it was this thread or a different one) but there was some pushback on that idea
Richard Feldman (Nov 21 2023 at 02:35):unique visitors yesterday
unique visitors today
pageviews yesterday
pageviews today
100x unique visitors and 80x pageviews compared to yesterday...I'd say all the effort on the new website paid off! :smiley:
Richard Feldman (Nov 21 2023 at 02:35):amazing work all around, everyone! :tada:
Luke Boswell (Nov 30 2023 at 22:25):Any issues with adding a link to https://github.com/roc-lang/roc on the front page of the website?
Richard Feldman (Nov 30 2023 at 22:27):seems reasonable as long as it can be unobtrusive...I'm not sure offhand where we could sneak it in without disrupting the beginner flow :thinking:
Luke Boswell (Dec 01 2023 at 01:06):How does this look?
Screenshot-2023-12-01-at-12.06.44.png
edit I can fix up the vertical alignment
Luke Boswell (Dec 01 2023 at 01:13):Or maybe for smaller screens
Screenshot-2023-12-01-at-12.12.44.png
Isaac Van Doren (Dec 01 2023 at 01:21):You could also try a section of icons linking to various things like GitHub, Twitter, Zulip, etc in a row
Luke Boswell (Dec 01 2023 at 02:16):How about this?
Screenshot-2023-12-01-at-13.16.26.png
Screenshot-2023-12-01-at-13.16.19.png
Richard Feldman (Dec 01 2023 at 02:17):I like the first one with just GitHub
Richard Feldman (Dec 01 2023 at 02:17):I assume that's an inline SVG for the GitHub logo?
Luke Boswell (Dec 01 2023 at 02:18):ghLogo =
(Html.element "svg")
[
(Html.attribute "viewBox") "0 0 98 96",
(Html.attribute "height") "25",
(Html.attribute "xmlns") "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg",
(Html.attribute "fill-rule") "evenodd",
(Html.attribute "clip-rule") "evenodd",
(Html.attribute "role") "img",
class "svg-logo",
]
[
(Html.element "path")[(Html.attribute "d") "M48.854 0C21.839 0 0 22 0 49.217c0 21.756 13.993 40.172 33.405 46.69 2.427.49 3.316-1.059 3.316-2.362 0-1.141-.08-5.052-.08-9.127-13.59 2.934-16.42-5.867-16.42-5.867-2.184-5.704-5.42-7.17-5.42-7.17-4.448-3.015.324-3.015.324-3.015 4.934.326 7.523 5.052 7.523 5.052 4.367 7.496 11.404 5.378 14.235 4.074.404-3.178 1.699-5.378 3.074-6.6-10.839-1.141-22.243-5.378-22.243-24.283 0-5.378 1.94-9.778 5.014-13.2-.485-1.222-2.184-6.275.486-13.038 0 0 4.125-1.304 13.426 5.052a46.97 46.97 0 0 1 12.214-1.63c4.125 0 8.33.571 12.213 1.63 9.302-6.356 13.427-5.052 13.427-5.052 2.67 6.763.97 11.816.485 13.038 3.155 3.422 5.015 7.822 5.015 13.2 0 18.905-11.404 23.06-22.324 24.283 1.78 1.548 3.316 4.481 3.316 9.126 0 6.6-.08 11.897-.08 13.526 0 1.304.89 2.853 3.316 2.364 19.412-6.52 33.405-24.935 33.405-46.691C97.707 22 75.788 0 48.854 0z"][],
]
.svg-logo {
fill: var(--text-color);
}
nice!
Jacob Elder (Jan 30 2024 at 13:08):Just noticed that https://www.roc-lang.org/different-names is rendering strangely: no left margin at all.
Anton (Jan 30 2024 at 13:15):Thanks for reporting that @Jacob Elder, could you file an issue?
Jeffrey Mudge (Feb 05 2024 at 22:10):List.first on that page is linking to https://www.roc-lang.org/builtins/List#join instead of https://www.roc-lang.org/builtins/List#first as well.
Richard Feldman (Feb 05 2024 at 22:57):oops, nice catch! Want to make a PR to fix it? :smiley:
Jeffrey Mudge (Feb 05 2024 at 23:42):Sure. Is this actually the source file https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/www/public/different-names/index.html ?
Jeffrey Mudge (Feb 05 2024 at 23:43):I mean, it's not being generated somehow?
Richard Feldman (Feb 05 2024 at 23:55):correct, it's just html
Jeffrey Mudge (Feb 06 2024 at 00:14):OK, here you go https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/pull/6507a
Richard Feldman (Feb 06 2024 at 01:10):awesome, thank you so much!
Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC