I really wish I'd read Kragen Sitaker's https://dercuano.github.io/notes/forth-assembling.html before I built SubX.

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I took a stab at reorganizing Mu's directory tree. It had gradually sprawled from old stuff at the top-level to new stuff in sub-directories. Now the top-level contains what I want people to see first, and build tools for each directory are in a sub-directory.

Building a disk image before:

./translate_mu_baremetal baremetal/life.mu

After:

./translate life.mu

Building an ELF binary before:

./translate_mu apps/hello.mu

After:

cd linux; ./translate hello.mu

https://github.com/akkartik/mu#readme

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Have you cloned the Mu repo and tried to make sense of it? Do you have any suggestions for improving the directory organization? I'm starting to revisit it, so would appreciate any thoughts you have. (Even if this gets you to clone the repo for the first time.)

https://github.com/akkartik/mu

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Drilling into computations on the Mu shell

This was one of the more difficult things I've built, and yet all I've gotten working so far is some rudimentary tokenization. The reason is one little feature.. well, take a look for yourself.

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-2021-02-24 (video; 2 mins)

As always, built all the way up from machine code, and designed primarily to be easy to build, easy to run, comprehensible to others. Also this time with lots of tests.

https://github.com/akkartik/mu

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I'm working through Make a Lisp with Mu

So far I'm done with https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md#step-0-the-repl, albeit with some tweaks since it's baremetal

https://github.com/akkartik/mu/tree/main/baremetal#readme

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An experimental way to do control flow in the postfix Mu shell

The screenshot below shows an idea I've been playing with.

The conventional way Forth does control flow is a little confusing with words like if and then showing up at the end.

Factor uses quotations to put code blocks on the stack. But then you see a potentially complex chunk of code executing "all at once".

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

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The Mu shell is now off Linux

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-mu-shell-20210214

Starting point for the sources: http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/baremetal/shell/line.mu.html

The architecture is now much cleaner. Functions contain lines, lines contain words, words contain gap buffers. Rendering a thing renders its constituent things. Render takes a top-left coordinate and returns a bottom-right coordinate. Each thing knows which constituent thing has its cursor, shows its cursor when rendering, redirects incoming keystrokes to it.

https://github.com/akkartik/mu

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I've been reimplementing my from-scratch live-updating postfix shell to really from scratch (no more OS kernel), while at the same time rewriting the prototype with lots of tests and actually giving the language some sort of rigorous basis. No demos yet, but in the meantime here's Conway's Game of Life running on baremetal Mu.

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-mu-life-2021-02-13

Sources: http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/apps/life.mu.html

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Standing offer: I would love to collaborate on a computing stack for a non-English language by forking https://github.com/akkartik/mu. It's very barebones and not afraid of radical experiments. It already has an API for rendering arbitrary UTF-8 strings and returning arbitrarily-sized bounding boxes for what was rendered. So the work is mostly creating glyphs for combinations of codepoints. And rules for segmenting. And lots of testing.

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It took a while, but I've finally ported a pre-existing Mu program to baremetal (not atop Linux): an RPN calculator.

This was hard, purely because of cursor management. I have a greater appreciation for everything that display hardware and terminal emulators provide for text mode. Mu so far puts the onus on the programmer.

http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/baremetal/rpn.mu.html

In the end it's interesting to visualize the changes I had to make:

vim -d apps/rpn.mu baremetal/rpn.mu

They're entirely in main; the rest is unchanged.

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I built a game of "snakes", but it came out more like an etch-a-sketch 😄

http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/baremetal/ex7.mu.html

Play it on any non-windows:

git clone https://github.com/akkartik/mu
cd mu
./translate_mu_baremetal_emulated baremetal/ex7.mu
qemu-system-i386 disk.img

h/j/k/l to draw.

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I made an art! On a computer without an OS.

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