2026-05-11 Trying out spinel on FreeBSD and fixed the blog feeds

One programming thing that always captures my interest is tooling that helps generate binaries. Recently there's been some work on spinel which is a (in-progress) compiler that can take Ruby surce code and generate a native executable. Let's quickly check how it runs on FreeBSD (support was added recently). This is mainly from the README

$ cat > hello.rb <<'RUBY'
> def fib(n)
>   if n < 2
>     n
>   else
>     fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)
>   end
> end
>
> puts fib(34)
> RUBY

# generate
$ ./spinel hello.rb
hello.rb -> hello

# check the output size, not bad
$ ls -lah hello
-rwxr-xr-x  1 user user   11K May 11 20:06 hello

# compare against the source
$ ls -lah hello.rb
-rw-r--r--  1 user user   87B May 11 20:06 hello.rb

Also, on another note I fixed the RSS feeds on the blog to ensure the summaries did not include broken tags in the summaries. However, this meant that for subscribers this might mean the feeds got reset (sorry about that). One thing I am realizing is that simple RSS feed generation is a nice quality of life issue for blogging tools. Although, lately it seems more newer blogs seem to eschew this functionality (sadly).