May 30, 2020
It's amazing how much you can do layout-wise with just plain text. Pictured in this toot:
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Poems by e e cummings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings)
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May 30, 2020
A new day, a new app
A text-mode paginator for text files. Think `more`, but no ncurses, no termbox, no libc, just Linux syscalls.
2-minute demo video:
https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-2020-05-29
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May 28, 2020
I'm starting to build some simple apps in Mu, my memory-safe language that translates 1:1 to machine code.
Today I built a program to print a file to screen:
http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/linux/apps/print-file.mu.html
Also:
- I fixed a bug in the process
- I wished I already had clobbered-variable warnings.
- I wished I had type checks.
All in all, this language isn't ready for others yet. I'm constantly inspecting the code generated by the translator.
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May 23, 2020
Tired: a chicken is just an egg's way of making another egg.
Wired: the Game of Life is just a glider's way of getting around.
Inspired: the rules of Conway's Game of Life are just the square root of a glider's way to achieve a 90°-rotation-then-flip.
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May 23, 2020
I'm back from a death march.
Mu is a safe language built in machine code, translating almost 1:1 to machine code. A key check is for use-after-free errors, using a second address type ("Bicycles for the mind have to be see-through", section 4.4)
I spent the last 2 months switching all of Mu's implementation to this scheme. It was a tough time. But now I know it works (with 10-15% slowdown), and Mu functions calling low-level libraries should behave unsurprisingly.
https://github.com/akkartik/mu
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Apr 19, 2020
I went through an intensive Forth phase a couple of years ago before embarking on SubX, but somehow missed this Chuck Moore talk at Strange Loop:
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip
I watched it today at 1.5x, and it still took me 2 hours to watch. I had to pause every couple of seconds to digest what I'd just heard. Fascinating.
Forth chips focus on power, and therefore tiny memories. It's a powerful justification for remaining in the nostalgic console aesthetic of the 80s.
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Apr 13, 2020
Yak shave of the day
My editor shows signs on the margins to indicate changes since last commit. I wanted it to show diffs from an arbitrary commit.
This feature request had been understandably refused a year ago: https://github.com/mhinz/vim-signify/issues/232
So I fixed it for myself, in 3 easy steps:
- Find a simpler version: 1650 => 900 lines.
- Delete even more code: -600 lines.
- Add the feature: +2 lines.
The final result only works for me. I believe we should share raw VimScript, not packages.
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Mar 23, 2020
The Mu compiler summarized in one page
(Brief update since there isn't much to report: I'm working on safe heap allocations as described in the paper. But it's slow going because of life and the need to unwind some past decisions.)
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Mar 16, 2020
I'm hitting publish on my paper.
Kartik Agaram, "Bicycles for the mind have to be see-through", Convivial Computing Salon, 2020.
http://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200315.pdf [pdf; 25 pages]
Get it? When I look over at my bicycle I can see right through its frame. I can take in at a glance how the mechanism works, how the pedals connect up with the wheels, and how the wheels connect up with the brakes. And yet, when we try to build bicycles for the mind, we resort to “hiding” and “abstraction”.
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