This week in my postfix language and live-updating environment, I worked on a way to start from a raw computation, and extract functions from it as naturally as possible.

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-20201020

(More details: https://github.com/akkartik/mu)

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My postfix language and its live-updating environment are starting to look promising. The environment can now expand multiple levels of function calls, laying out the state of the stack at each point. You can't edit a function at its call-site, but you can visualize its working in context.

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-2020-10-10

(More details: https://github.com/akkartik/mu)

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Detective story of the day

I've been stress-testing Mu's floating-point instructions for a few days using this ray-tracing tutorial.

It's been great; I've found 2 bugs so far.

Today I thought I found a third, in the floating-point reciprocal instruction.

Except it wasn't really. Read on.

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I just finished adding floating-point to Mu. Took 4 days. Floating-point is where the ugliness of x86 really becomes apparent.

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Update on stress-testing Mu

I'm continuing to play with my prototype postfix calculator. Who knows, it may even become Mu's mythical level-3 language[1].

Today's video demonstrates function definitions that look different from concatenative languages, and a visualization for drilling down into function calls. All in an environment that updates as you type, built up from machine code.

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-2020-09-27

(More details: https://github.com/akkartik/mu)

[1] http://akkartik.name/post/mu-2019-1

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Some tweaks to my text-mode RPN calculator built up from machine code, thanks to lots of helpful comments on the Future of Coding community.

https://github.com/akkartik/mu/tree/main/linux/tile

Project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

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New demo: a text-mode RPN calculator built up from machine code

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-2020-09-20

Inspirations:

• LoGlo
• Brief

Unlike these, however, this version tries to hew to two principles:

• Show all the data (following spreadsheets and Joshua Horowitz)
• Minimize interaction (following Bret Victor)

Project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

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Funny story

A few weeks ago I built a function to read keystrokes from the keyboard. (In machine code, of course.) I planned to support just ASCII keys to begin.

Today I tried to force myself to work on the rest. Terminal escape sequences like arrow keys, UTF-8, and somehow distinguishing between the two.

Surprise: both were already working! I just had to read 32 bits rather than 8 from stdin. Legal UTF-8 doesn't conflict with terminal escapes in 32-bit space.

https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/e403d15732

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3 months ago I built a little prototype text-mode browser for a tiny subset of Markdown. Today it's a prototype no longer; it has fairly thorough tests. See how I write tests for the rendering in a language that maps 1:1 to machine code:

http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/apps/browse/main.mu.html#L81

Old demo: https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-2020-05-29

Repo: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

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Mu now has support for Unicode. Just graphemes that map to single code points; no combining characters.

Mu also is starting to gain a fake screen that (interactive) programs can print to in tests.

Here's how it looks: https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-2020-09-02

Strings are arrays of bytes. To iterate over the graphemes in a string, store it in a stream and read graphemes from the stream.

https://github.com/akkartik/mu

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