Hey Notepad! Nice process you got there. Would be a shame if someone were to... butt in.

In this video, we learn about applications and processes and threads, and use Win32 APIs to create a remote thread in another process, running into all kinds of complications on the way there.

But eventually, we manage to cause a little chaos. Because we can! And because it's the first step on our road to ultimate goal: playing video games... without playing at all.

So! Rust futures! Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Until it's not. So let's do the easy thing, and then instead of waiting for the hard thing to sneak up on us, we'll go for it intentionally.

Choo choo here comes the easy part 🚂💨

We make a new project:

$ cargo new waytoodeep
     Created binary (application) `waytoodeep` package

Damian Sommer did a casual AMA on Reddit recently, about his upcoming game, The Yawhg. I got to ask him a few questions. Here's what he had to say.

"I was just kind of tired of them. There's still one more platformer I really want to finish, (The Clown Who Wanted Everything), but besides that, I'm just extremely bored of them now."

Welcome back!

In the last article, we did foundational work on minipak, our ELF packer.

It is now able to receive command-line arguments, environment variables, and auxiliary vectors. It can parse those command-line arguments into a set of options. It can make an ELF file smaller using the LZ4 compression algorithm, and pack it together with stage1, our launcher.

Last week-end, I participated to Ludum Dare for the fourth time in a row!

Downloads: Linux (64) | OS/X | Windows

So here is our entry: Legithief. The backstory is simple, yet cunning: you are an ordinary thief practicing ordinary acts of thievery in the houses of ordinary people to make a living. But one day.. you are quietly robbing yet another home, when you are suddenly smashed in the head with a bat.

In the previous article, I gave brummi a go. However, we've seen that it still doesn't fit our requirements: we need a tool that's fast, easy to install and configure, produces beautiful and usable docs.

Yesterday I started building my own documentation generator, and in this series I'll present the challenges I face and how I solved them. This might show a few ooc tricks, perhaps some software design, some good, some bad, but overall I hope it'll be a good read!

It took a hot minute.

Try several weeks.

Well, yeah. I got to contribute to a bunch of open-source projects in the meantime though, so I'm fairly pleased with it!

• libffi (for static linking)
• cairo (more static linking!)
• proxy-libintl (more static linking!)
• expat (static linking strikes again)
• poppler (for file descriptor stuff not properly gated on Windows, closed in favor of a similar MR)

The day 5 challenge actually looks fun!

Our input looks like this:

    [D]
[N] [C]
[Z] [M] [P]
 1   2   3

move 1 from 2 to 1
move 3 from 1 to 3
move 2 from 2 to 1
move 1 from 1 to 2

Which is a visual representation of stacks, and so, for once, we have some serious parsing to do, and that means I finally have a good reason to bust out the nom crate.

So, how does ping.exe actually send a ping? It seems unrealistic that ping.exe itself implements all the protocols involved in sending a ping. So it must be calling some sort of library. Also, since it ends up talking to the outside world via a NIC (network interface controller), the kernel is probably involved at some point.

In reading files the hard way - part 2, we learned about dynamic libraries (like libc), and the Linux kernel, and how syscalls allowed us to ask the Linux kernel to do our bidding. For this series, we're going to have to look at the Windows equivalents.

Now that my website is deployed as a container image, I wanted to give nix a try. I'm still doing it the old-fashioned way right now: with a Dockerfile, running cargo in a "builder" image, copying stuff out of there into a slimmer image (that still has an Ubuntu base, even though distroless images are a thing now).

I was mostly interested in nix because some parts of my website have pretty big native dependencies. itself mostly relies on sqlite3 and some JS engine (used to be quickjs, currently duktape because MSVC Windows builds). But the asset processing pipeline, (which I'd like to integrate with at some point) has a bunch more!