In this Tidbit version of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots interviews Mattias Wadman, one of the maintainers of the jq project. This was great fun as we just finished learning jq in Programming By Stealth.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_08_06

You can find out more about Mattias & the various projects he is working on at the links below:

• Follow Mattias on Mastodon: @wader@fosstodon.org

• Mattias’ GitHub Profile which hosts some notable jq-related projects:

  • fq for querying binary files with the jq language: github.com/wader/fq

    • A list of presentations about fq — github.com/…
    • The fork of the Go version of jq that powers fq — github.com/…

  • The language definition file for adding jq support to IDEs like VS Code: github.com/wader/jq-lsp

  • jq implemented in jq: github.com/wader/jqjq

• Some notable jq commits & files mentioned during the interview:

  • The very first commit in Haskel
  • The switch to C
  • jq’s main function which is written in jq — https://github.com/…

• A version of jq implemented in Go: github.com/itchyny/gojq

• A version of jq implemented in Rust by Michael Färber: github.com/01mf02/jaq

  • Michael’s formal specification of the jq language — github.com/…
  • The “Denotational Semantics and a Fast Interpreter for jq” academic paper by Michael