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!

There’s one thing that bothers me. In part 1, why are we using hyper-staticfile? Couldn’t we just use file:/// URLs?

Well, first off: showing off how easy it is to serve some static files, even in a “scary” language like Rust, is just not something I could pass up.

But also: think about distributing salvage as a tool. Will we want to distribute all those HTML/CSS/JS/font files alongside it?

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.

Our January project was ambitious: a 2D puzzle game, a-la lemmings with a twist, with big and numerous levels. And of course, all using our homegrown tools, from the compiler to the level editor to the UI system and game framework.

However, January ended too soon, and, sleepless nights notwithstanding, I had to resolve to publish something completely different. It was a good occasion to get to know Twine.

This is going to be a short one.

Basically, since February, both shamanas, fredreichbier and I have putting way too much work into the latest iteration of rock, an ooc compiler written in ooc.

I have the pleasure to announce that version 0.9.7, codename pacino is now out, as you can plainly see on the new website: https://ooc-lang.github.io

You can read the release notes to learn what has changed, but basically expect a lot of fixes, some new APIs, and awesome backtraces.

I still get excited about programming languages. But these days, it’s not so much because of what they let me do, but rather what they don’t let me do.

Ultimately, what you can with a programming language is seldom limited by the language itself: there’s nothing you can do in C++ that you can’t do in C, given infinite time.

As long as a language is turing-complete and compiles down to assembly, no matter the interface, it’s the same machine you’re talking to. You’re limited by… what your hardware can do, how much memory it has (and how fast it is), what kind of peripherals are plugged into it, and so on.

Some bugs are merely fun. Others are simply delicious!

Today’s pick is the latter.

Reproducing the issue, part 1

(It may be tempting to skip that section, but reproducing an issue is an important part of figuring it out, so.)

I’ve never used Emacs before, so let’s install it. I do most of my computing on an era-appropriate Ubuntu, today it’s Ubuntu 22.10, so I just need to:

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).

But why?

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

The day 13 puzzle needs a speech therapist.

…because it has an awful lisp!! Ahhhahahahhhh

No but seriously we have what are ostensibly S-expressions, except they use JSON-adjacent notation:

[1,1,3,1,1] [1,1,5,1,1] [[1],[2,3,4]] [[1],4] [9] [[8,7,6]] [[4,4],4,4] [[4,4],4,4,4] [7,7,7,7] [7,7,7] [] [3] [[[]]] [[]] [1,[2,[3,[4,[5,6,7]]]],8,9] [1,[2,[3,[4,[5,6,0]]]],8,9]