If you are really attached to such idea and would love to work on it, your best bet is to reimplement it on your own, with a new code base. That is if you didn't sign a NDA.
I can't understand the reasoning on putting everything behind HTTP these days. Personally, I think that if a project decides to go that route it's because poor design decisions. Separation of interests should exist in software solutions.
This program looks interesting. Maybe it could help in the bootstrap process of tcc, though I don't know if it is written in ANSI C. On a related note, I will try to test compiling lua's runtime environment and interpreter, because I'm sure it is written using standard C already.
I'm glad I made the switch from Arch to Void. Runit is clean and simple, it does the correct job in a deterministic fashion, if something fails proper errors appear on usual logs.
I'm curious, is the compilation time that takes too much, or is it the execution time? I'm really interested in learning the language, but I don't want to end-up with programs that generate slower native code, compared to that of C. What's your experience with it?
Before I migrated to Void, I used slackware-current extensively, it is indeed the cleanest GNU/Linux distribution I've found. Personally, I loved manually dependency resolution, but sadly didn't had the time to do it, so I ended up with Void, and it really shines on staying out of my way.
I know that from a technical point of view, Emacs is not just a text editor; I think it is a complete lisp virtual machine with a text-based interface that happens to be prepared for editing text by default, and thus it should be treated as such, instead of running it over as a userland program maybe one day it works as a standalone operating system, with its own kernel and JIT compiled lisp dialect. I'm saying this, because when I first started using Unix-like operating systems Emacs was one of the things that attracted me the most, but after actively using it for almost a year I saw how it moved away from the expected operation mode of a typical Unix environment, and I didn't like that. I came to appreciate the phylosophy of "One program to do one thing and do it well... make programs that work together", I consider it an elegant way to design and implement software, thus I don't see where Emacs fits on a Unix-like system. In the end, I ditched it in favor of something much more simple, fast and adecuate, this is where vis does an outstanding job, having the unique plus of using a structural regular expressions engine, and extensible using Lua. vis is small (source code and binary) and I don't have to think about what SSL implementation it should use, because there is a system library that does it for me, since vis is just a text editor, and succeeds at it.
I would like to include Void as a serious, competent and elegant distribution. I've used it for a complete year, and have really come to appreciate its focus on simplicity, reminds how Arch was before they decided to use systemd.
I share the same fascination you have. I'm always interested in how our brains collectively developed ways to communicate through spoken languages, it makes wonder how things will change a thousand years from now. I'm sure some developing patterns could arise.
FreeBSD's kernel offers better performance (on the server) compared to Linux, and the licensing model makes it more attractive to some industries. Whatsapp (server side), Netflix, and the internals of PS3/4 all use FreeBSD code. OpenBSD is actively used in networks, as a firewall (where iptables from Linux is a mess) and other security oriented aspects where stability is also crucial. Linux is popular because it became available to users first than the others back in the 90s, OpenBSD's contributors, on the contrary, are comfortable on not implementing overengineered "features" with the sole purpose on keeping the source clean, stable, and with as less bugs as possible, as a UNIX system should be.
When I read things like this, it makes appreciate OpenBSD (and the rest of projects under the OpenBSD Foundation) even more, considering how it is still actively and fearlessly maintained by few individuals (less than 40), motivated mainly by their own enthusiast and passion, investing their own time and money on it, just for the purpose of producing a bloat-free OS focused on security and correctness, that can rival GNU/Linux in terms of performance.
GNU stands for a philosophy of freedom, thus guixsd won't provide official repositories for installing proprietary software, some users don't like it, even though they might be interested in the technological approach of the system.
GNU utilities, are not only unsexy, they are bloated and messy, and prone to failure; the GNU implementations (coreutils: grep, cat, tail, etc) of standard UNIX tools are not done with simplicity in mind.
But hey, after all GNU is Not Unix. For those of us, who really appreciate the UNIX philosophy still have OpenBSD, which is the only light in a world of chaos, in my opinion.
I agree with you on 16/44.1 audio, I have a transparent DAC that can output 24/96, and on repeated blind tests I have failed to identify which is which, using files from the same source (a 24/96 song converted to 16/44.1). For audio production and mixing 24/96 makes a lot of sense though, because of dynamic range.
If you are into headphones, you could start hanging out on the subreddit. It's a big community, and you'll see many of the current technologies. It could get really expensive, I mean the new Sennheiser closed-back HD820 has a ~$2k price tag (ouch!), but certainly you could call yourself done with a $400 dollar setup, including DAC and Amplifier.
EDIT: You could also try IEMs, Etymotic makes some of the most clear, coherent, natural and neutral sounding. Their TOTL (Top-Of-The-Line) is the ER4 line which has a MSRP of $350, but you could get the same value with the ER3 line at $179.