News about the Frink programming language and calculating tool. Frink *will* make you better at physics and science.

Joined November 2010
Frink may be easier to install and run than you think on most operating systems: * Have Java installed ( java.com/ ) On Fedora Linux “dnf install java” * Download the Frink .jar file frinklang.org/frinkjar/frink… * Double-click that file!
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Hey, if anyone cares, my human account @aeliasen keeps getting insta-banned for "inauthentic behavior" (whatever that means) by some broken rule when I wake up and like the first tweet of the day. If you know someone at X who can fix this, that would be helpful.
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You know I'm an anti-spammer. And I have important conversations with friends that have recently died that I can't access anymore. And X's procedures for reinstating the account just say "something went wrong; it's not your fault. Try again." Forever. Sigh.
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I also love how X's messages say "after careful consideration, we banned your account" and it perpetually happens 2 picoseconds after I wake up and liked the first tweet of the day.
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I love when ramen shops say "we keep a little bit of yesterday's batch so we have some of the batch from 1953." Is that true? If you have a 5 gallon (19 liter) pot and you keep 10% each day, there will not be a molecule left of the original after 27 days. frinklang.org/fsp/solve2.fsp…
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The link above is Frink's system-of-equations solver that lets you apply your own estimates for this problem and solves for knowns and unknowns. It's incredibly powerful! Even if you keep 50% of the soup each day, there will be no molecule left of the original after 90 days.
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This guy is a genius and everything he's building is magical and of the highest order of creativity and brilliance. You would be wise to follow his achievements with great interest. @VictorTaelin
Bend2 launches tomorrow (maybe?) Let me talk a little bit For these who don't know me, I'm Victor. I've started programming when I was 11 years old, when I maintained a popular Open Tibia server in C++ and Lua. Since then, I enrolled Computer Engineering (never finished), helped build Ethereum, and have been studying programming language theory for the last decade. I've then built Kind (a minimal proof language), HVM (a parallel VM), and Bend1 (an early prototype of Bend2). So, what is Bend2? You can describe it as "the language design I honestly consider to be the best possible for a post-AGI economy". Bend2 doesn't have interaction nets, because I could not make them as fast as lower-order variants on everyday hardware, and Bend2 is designed to be practical, not idealistic. So, these expecting a Haskell-like lambda calculus engine will be disappointed. It is closer to C than it is to Haskell. But it still feels incredibly high-level, with JS-like closures and allocation (yet no GC!), Lean-like dependent types, and, of course, Bend1-like parallelism (with up to 100x faster raw speeds). So, Bend2 is something new that, on my honest PoV, has the potential to become the most sensible choice for any vibe-coded project. It is fast like C, parallel like CUDA, feels like Python. And, on top of that, it has something rare: a complete proof system, like Lean, which some of you may recognize as the language that labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have been using to solve open mathematical problems like Navier-Stokes. Bend brings that same proof system to a super fast app-centric language, allowing you to shift these powerful theorem proving models into ensuring that your apps are bug-free and hack-proof. The same capabilities that proved Navier-Stokes will now be writing real proofs that your own apps are correct. And I envision this as the obvious future of vibe-coded codebases. In a post-AGI economy, humans will eventually stop writing and reading code, but we still need a precise language to communicate our intents to the AI's maintaining our codebases. Bend is that language. Of course, Bend is not perfect yet. Writing a programming language is hard. Writing a proof language is 10x harder than that. Proving its consistency is 10x harder than that. Compiling it to the GPU, including closures, unrestricted recursion, fast object allocation and GC-free collection... is something nobody else has done before. So, needless to say: *expect bugs and limitations*. There is a huge ass section in our README talking about current limitations. For example, u64 and f64 are out. I did try adding them, but Metal doesn't even support f64. I gave up for now. On the brigher side, we have 32-bit numbers now, and Bend1's 2 GB memory limit has been lifted to 8 TB. Bend2 has a LOT of features that Bend1 lacked, and you'll find them in our guide. Bugs are expected mostly in the compiler, which, unlike the trusted proof kernel (which is very stable already), has a LOT of AI slop. There is no way on Earth there won't be many bugs. So, if your app crashes on day 1: please be patient, report and let us fix it <3 On the business: we ship without a product. Everything I could think of was either blocked by laws, or by the market not paying for compilers, and I'd rather increase our chances of success, than risk them just to make some immediate profit, or delay it foreer. Yes, years working in a project that isn't going to make a cent. I'm ok with it, because we have other, cooler things being cooked, and these are waaay easier to sell. So, yes, I'm giving this all to the world. Wanna show some appreciation? Just use it, create some apps, tell your friends about it, give it a fair chance and don't immediately give up if the compiler crashes or someone proves Empty on day 1 (yes, the theory is formalized, but the kernel drifted, so early days exploits are not impossible). If you find any bug, report it. If you miss any feature, request it. Our team of 4 humans (and 25 non-humans!) will be working hard to fix issues, address limitations, and make this language competitive with the mature alternatives in the market. I'm really proud of Bend2, I think it has the potential to become best language of choice for vibe-coded project, and I hope you find it as useful as I do. That's it for now. See you tomorrow(?) ^-^
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Frink's web servers now support PQC (Post-Quantum Cryptography) key exchange so you nerds who were spending billions to break my users' communications using quantum computers were FOILED AGAIN. Also your quantum computer can't factor a number larger than 15 LOL.
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Any time some multi-billion-dollar company announces a new quantum computer, ask them "what's the largest number it can factor?" They will ignore you because nobody can factor a number larger than 15 with an existing quantum computer. Really!
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Please read this hilarious paper if you don't believe me: "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog": eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237
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Frink servers have undergone an operating system upgrade. Please let us know if something's not working right.
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Frink servers are currently undergoing an operating system upgrade. Backup servers are in place but some features may be degraded.
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The Crash and Compile contest at DEFCON has the coolest trophy ever--a giant metal d20 with different programming languages on each side. Watch the Frink side being laser-engraved! Made by the incredibly-talented @krux . There's still time to win it! youtube.com/watch?v=ZOFdRzpb…
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Physical OR gate
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I will admit that Frink's implementation of that function once had the bug described above for negative values of "a". That was back in 2005. 17/
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To contrast, I received the bug report one morning, and I was ashamed that I didn't have time to fix it before I left for work. I fixed it when I got home that day. Compare that to Java taking *3 years* to release a fix. 18/
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Getting the Jacobi symbol function is important. It's actually REALLY important for cryptography. So I hope the author of the article above gets it right and makes it correct for cryptography. 19/19
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I'm going to go off on a thread about this post and why getting it right is important and how getting this calculation wrong had huge implications on breaking encryption and security in Java! Misunderstanding an operator (mod, also written %) might break all your security! 1/x
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Here's a link to a Frink implementation of the Jacobi Symbol. It gets things right if "a" is a negative number, unlike the top-linked article, and is usable for cryptography or Lucas-Lehmer tests. frinklang.org/fsp/colorize.f… 16/
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For a long time, the behavior of the C-language implementation of the modulus operator "%" was undefined! They just let it do whatever you wanted to do for negative arguments! That was really bad and made lots of programs into time bombs! 15/
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It is because of this difference that EVERY SINGLE USE OF THE MODULUS OPERATOR "%" IN BOOKS AND IN PAPERS SHOULD BE METICULOUSLY DEFINED AS TO THE SIGN CONVENTIONS. Most book or cryptography authors or compiler writers don't even know there's an issue. 14/
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So, what is the source of this bug? It's partially that many different programming languages define the modulus operator (often written "%") differently. They behave differently if some of the arguments are negative! 13/
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