I wanted to take some time to write about a piece of software I’ve been working on lately, just so you know how I’ve been spending the last few weeks.

Rationale

A few years ago, I designed a programming language: ooc. Even though I’ve done my fair share of Java, C, Ruby, JavaScript, and even some Perl, Scala, Python, PHP, etc., I still find myself going back to ooc because it gives me access to C libs, relatively high-level constructs, and it forces me to write code that’s not too smart.

I love diagrams. I love them so much!

In fact, I have fairly poor visualization skills, so making a diagram is extremely helpful to me: I’ll have some vague idea of how different things are connected, and then I’ll make a diagram, and suddenly there’s a tangible thing I can look at and talk about.

Of course the diagram only represents a fraction of what I had in mind in the first place, but that’s okay: the point is to be able to talk about some aspect of a concept, and so I have to make choices about what to include in the diagram. And maybe make several diagrams.

So. Serializing IPv4 packets. Easy? Well, not exactly.

IPv4 was annoying to parse, because we had 3-bit integers, and 13-bit integers, and who knows what else. Serializing it is going to be exactly the same.

Right now, we don’t have a way to serialize that.

Let’s take the version and ihl fields, both of which are supposed to take 4 bits, together making a byte. We could serialize them like this:

ooc makes it easy to compile your application on all major platforms (Windows, OSX, Linux) - the compiler itself runs there, and the SDK supports all these platforms with basic functionality: data structures, file handling, time handling, networking, etc.

But between getting your application running on your dev environment with all the libraries installed, and getting it into a neat package for your users to run without having to install any dependencies by hand, there’s a bag of tricks. Fortunately, I have found the time to figure most of them out. I’ll try to explain these in detail here as clearly as possible, here in this article.

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.

What brought you out of your usual “let’s make fucked up platformers” style?

“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.”

To the programmers

It’s too easy! Where’s the documentation for the API? I found an injection vulnerability! Global functions from ‘window’ leak! I tried to attack your server then realized nginx was ignoring me!

Keep struggling, my pretties. The game is not meant for you, but you are good guinea pigs nonetheless. Just because the game involved programming, you found yourself so, so terribly wrong about one thing: that you understood at all what was happening.

Welcome back and thanks for joining us for the reads notes… the thirteenth installment of our series on ELF files, what they are, what they can do, what does the dynamic linker do to them, and how can we do it ourselves.

I’ve been pretty successfully avoiding talking about TLS so far (no, not that one) but I guess we’ve reached a point where it cannot be delayed any further, so.

Once upon a time, @Cinememer wrote some alternative lyrics to “Under The Sea”. I couldn’t resist singing them!

I unfortunately lost the audio files for this. Oh well.

• Instrumental (Neverland Orchestra)

The year is drawing to a close, and I’m going off on a much-needed holiday next week. This seems like a good time to look back at the past twelve months!

I can’t believe that shipped

2018 was the year of foundational work. As far as “work work” is concerned, I spent the first 9 months finishing up my largest project ever, the itch v25 rewrite.