Weeknote 2025-47

I decided that instead of replacing my AirTags I’m just going to keep using them. My old iPhone is staying in the household anyway so my kids can do Times Table Rock Stars when we’re out and about, so I’ll just leave it signed into my Apple account and use that.

Hopefully, I’ll need to actually use them infrequently enough that it’ll not be a big burden to find the phone each time. And also hopefully by the time this iPhone actually dies, the industry will have sorted out an alternative that mostly does what I want it to.

In further phone related teething issues, I went to the shop on evening last week for some essentials, and it wasn’t until I’d got all the way to the checkout that I realised I’d left the house without my wallet, as I often do, but that I hadn’t actually set up any cards on Google Wallet yet. So I was left at the checkout, with a basket full of shopping and no means of paying, which was incredibly embarrassing.

I found some time to write some code this weekend, so I scratched an itch that’s been bothering me for a while. I work on the CRuby interpreter a fair bit, and the codebase is a large, old, sprawling, Autotools/Make based behemoth.

I want to use clangd as an LSP server so I can get all the nice navigation and auto-completion, and code actions goodness. But clangd requires a json file telling it what compiler flags are needed for each source unit, so it can successfully build the code enough to introspect it.

Unfortunately for me, CMake is currently the only build system that supports generating these compile database files currently, so the rest of us are left having to use third party tools.

For ages I’ve been relying on a shell script that glues together two such tools, bear, and compdb, into my Make workflow, but this project is my attempt at replacing that with a small binary that does what I need.

Of course, I wrote it in Rust.