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Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran

• 29 Comments
• It's always nice to see production codebases in languages that you've never used but are interested in.
  Tangential, but to the author, are there any FORTRAN codebases you feel are well designed?

  By h4ch1 2 hours ago

• Good reminder to dig around. Will check. We picked up the Fortran manual and just went for it.
  The original Manual exists as a PDF. Was it in a Stuttgart uni URL? Just a search away.
  Late in Sweden, gotta Fortran tomorrow. Happy to continue discussion here tomorrow.

  By FormerLabFred 2 hours ago

• Are there any other AT protocol apps that aren’t derivatives of bluesky? By that I mean, not social media feed related, twitter clone.

  By hk1337 3 hours ago

• Yep lots! Mine is a livestreaming service: https://stream.place
  Also a great blogging platform: https://leaflet.pub
  Here's a goal tracker: https://goals.garden
  This one just dropped recently; it's 44 different atproto-related apps with a cyberpunk theme: https://www.aetheros.computer/
  Lots others mentioned here: https://blueskydirectory.com/

  By iameli 2 hours ago

• AT conference in a couple of days. In Vancouver. Bet they are all there and the rest of the AT bunch.

  By FormerLabFred 2 hours ago

• Don’t know if people are building GitHub-like systems, offline-first app sync etc
  Many devs reuse schema and write some twitter/bsky clone
  Kind of search engine for my Blueaky likes
  Gotta get off the timeline, germ has a messaging app, then there is Tangled and some more
  We do Fortransky and Cobolsky now, got more ideas for the protocol than time :)

  By FormerLabFred 2 hours ago

• https://tangled.org/ <--- GitHub on ATProto
  that's all I'm aware of
  (edit) Oops, just saw that you mentioned it, confused by your first line then. Tangled is awesome!

  By linolevan 2 hours ago

• i am currently working on a dropbox alternative: https://dropb.at

  By tjuene 2 hours ago

• out of curiosity, why fortran? no disrespect. I wrote a lot of scientific software in the earlier days of my career and I learned fortran to update ocean modeling software.

  By cat-turner 4 hours ago

• You are not the first one to ask :)
  We built Cobolsky. Will go public soon. Parallelly too curious on Fortran. The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it :)
  When we are building the feed composer, in next version, Fortran will be great for the algorithm etc.
  Keeping the ancient languages alive. I built some Cobol stuff many years ago. Back at it again. Rusty.
  Both Cobolsky and Fortransky looks great on Swordfish90’s cool-retro-term, but we are building our own terminal for Fortransky too. There is a blog post with screenshots over at Patreon/formerlab
  Can’t get enough Fortran

  By FormerLabFred 3 hours ago

• > The world is better with a Fortran-based social network client in it
  If you don't mind me asking, why is the world better with more Fortran-based software?

  By embedding-shape 3 hours ago

• Our modern languages are built on it, and it’s incredibly fast,
  so it deserves to be kept alive. We owe a great deal to the people who wrote it in the 1950s I guess

  By FormerLabFred 3 hours ago

• I came here to suggest COBOL as a better fit, then saw your comment a few levels up in this thread.
  Out of curiosity, does your implementation use CODASYL?
  (For people that don't pay much attention to historical software systems, most CODASYL implementations were similar to JSON document databases, so going that way isn't as crazy as it sounds.)

  By hedora 13 minutes ago

• > Our modern languages are built on it
  It's part of the lineage, yeah, probably started with Algol though? Fast I guess is always nice, but I'm not sure that's enough to keep it alive solely for that, at least to me.

  By embedding-shape 2 hours ago

• This thread makes me happy

  By mountainriver 2 hours ago

• > why fortran?
  why not? the language is straightforward and loops are fast. It is portable and your code will work unchanged for the next 50 years. It may be a bit verbose, but that's not a big deal with today's tooling.

  By enriquto 3 hours ago

• Fortran will survive the cockroaches even, when the world 404s

  By FormerLabFred 3 hours ago

• Your code will work unchanged until you try to change compilers or your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language.

  By pklausler 3 hours ago

• > your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language
  Like all the 3 of them they added in the last 30 years, and that compiler vendors are not enforcing anyway because they don’t want to annoy their users?
  Windows’ backward compatibility is a joke compared to Fortran.

  By kergonath 2 hours ago

• maybe they weren't really concerned about portability or a decent standard?

  By pklausler 3 hours ago

• It’s keyboard navigation only, and we got the Bluesky firehose raw straight into the Rust decoder. Or we switch mode to Jetstream with m+EnTER :)
  You hit l+ENTER to like a post. If anyone replies from Bluesky, we hit n+ENTER and see the notifs. And so on
  Fortransky is 70% Fortran, rest is Rust, C and a tiny Python helper

  By FormerLabFred 3 hours ago

• Building a TUI in Fortran is genuinely impressive. The AT Protocol's HTTP/JSON API is well-suited for this kind of thing since you don't need a browser runtime — just HTTP calls and terminal rendering.
  Curious about the rendering approach. Are you doing the TUI layout with raw ANSI escape codes or using a Fortran curses binding? The challenge with terminal clients for social feeds is usually the text reflow when the terminal resizes, since you're essentially building a responsive layout engine with escape sequences.

  By patapim 2 hours ago

• AI slop comment

  By ccmcarey 44 minutes ago

• HN is getting legitimately difficult to use with how much AI spam has been flooding the comment section recently

  By dymk 5 minutes ago

• The world is a better place for this app. Wonderful!

  By uberdru 3 hours ago

• :) I mean there are still some people alive out there who never saw a web UI when beginning dev. They get a bit nostalgic, missing their 286
  It’s fun and it is appreciated by them, and the young ones who are curious

  By FormerLabFred 3 hours ago

• fortran > cobol

  By blundergoat 3 hours ago

• fortran .GT. cobol

  By pklausler 3 hours ago

• > forever

  By FormerLabFred 3 hours ago