I've been hanging out on the Handmade Network Discord channel recently. Mostly because I've developed RSI so can't work as much on Mu, and because I'm bored staying home for months on end.
The site seems to be some sort of offshoot from a channel where a game developer used to screencast himself developing a game: https://handmadehero.org/watch
From what I can piece together, Handmade Network periodically has some sort of Jam for a few days where a few people hack on projects following some theme.
The input is on the problem page. Scroll to the bottom of https://adventofcode.com/2019/day/3 to 'get your puzzle input'. You should be able to get the output by running the commands I gave. It's just a numeric answer so not super interesting.
But the experience frustrated me. It was hard for me to understand all the software under me as I provided abstractions above me.
So I spent the last 5 years gradually eliminating all the layers of abstraction that add complexity to my Lisp interpreter. The path passed through one other language for teaching programming: http://akkartik.name/post/mu. The sources for it are archived at https://github.com/akkartik/mu1 (there was an earlier prototype in Arc at https://github.com/akkartik/mu0)
At this point I have a very simple syntax for programming pretty much directly in machine code: https://github.com/akkartik/mu#readme. It can be translated to an ELF binary for Linux using about 250KB of static x86 instructions (80% of which are unit tests, and much else of which is duplicated because I built the translator in multiple passes that run in a shell pipeline:
The nice thing about the resulting ELF binaries is that they can be run directly on a Linux kernel with no other dependencies. Not even libc.
There's a script in the repo called `gen_iso` that can take a list of .subx files, translate them into an ELF binary and package up the ELF binary with just a Linux kernel into a bootable disk image. You can then boot this image either in Qemu or on a cloud service like Linode (http://akkartik.name/post/iso-on-linode)
This is what I have so far.
By contrast, the screenshot is quite fake. It's just a program that reads a line of text from the keyboard and prints it out to the screen. You can see it running on an emulated computer in Qemu that has nothing but a Linux kernel.
But I'm going to build up from that core into a high-level language. Maybe an Arc-inspired Lisp. Not a toy this time around.
Just give me 5 more years :D
To reiterate the main project link: https://github.com/akkartik/mu#readme. Should hopefully be pretty easy to get running on Mac or Linux. (Though you're mostly on Windows, right jsgrahamus? I'm really sorry I still don't know Windows well enough to support it :( )
Great! Yeah, I'd love to hear how you fare following the examples in the Readme.
The examples involving gen_iso take a while to run, which may be even greater atop VirtualBox. I'd recommend skipping those for now, particularly the very first one at the top of the Readme.
