Code Connections
I have been working with GALs for a while now - did a school project relating to them last year (with a writeup coming at some point) and now revisiting it to do a more insane personal project. GALs are a bit of an oddity. You can still buy them, but they're woefully outdated and use weird tools and DSLs to write them.
I needed a way to generate fuse maps for these parts, and I found
galette, which is a Rust library/tool
that is a replacement of GALasm, which itself is a "modern" (think late 90's instead of early)
port of GALer for the Atari. The fact that it was a Rust library was appealing,
and it had good comments and more modern style.
Anyways, I'm revisiting some work I did a year ago to extend my tool to support more
than one GAL chip (larger designs). I'm messing around with Zig now, but using galette
as a reference. The author seemed to have commented in early January on an issue,
but hadn't worked on the repo much otherwise. Not that there was much that needed
doing. When your project targets chips originally made in the 80s, new features
don't typically pop up.
I was browsing through the source and wanted to see if he had other projects. He had a website on his Github profile, but it timed out. Weird - I thought I looked at this a long time ago. His commit activity stopped harshly in June of last year. But he replied to an issue. I decided to look up his name and see if I could find anything.
The third or fourth result was an obituary.
It felt... strange. Simultaneously this person with whom which I've never exchanged words, but whose work I am intimately familiar with. Unlike Bram of Vim fame, this is much smaller scale. I'm probably the first person outside of immediate colleagues who discovered this. His website has expired, and there's not much of it on the archive. Did you know that he helped design the Nix logo?
Fuck Cancer.