A 3-minute video showing what it's currently like to prototype programs on the Mu computer. There are lots of limitations. It's slow, and it can only handle short runs.
While these limitations will be relaxed over time, the goal is partly to nudge people to throw the prototype away once they know what they want, and rewrite it one level down. Therefore: encourage people to write lots of tests.
I tried and failed to implement Bresenham's line algo. Horizontal and
vertical lines work.
No macros => lots of lambdas.
The computer keeps crashing because I type too fast (still can't brain interrupt handlers). It frequently saves to disk, but as an s-expression. Reboots lose indentation.
Ok, edit on host -> create disk image.
I have lots of little buffers. When they overflow the computer crashes.
Without a call stack.
The bug wasn't in Mu or in Bresenham. I just typoed when I edited the disk image 😂
Still lots of catastrophic bugs that require editing the disk image. The disk is clobbered on reboot because I added support for reading multiple sectors from disk but still only write one sector.
A rudimentary, hokey capability system. No mouse yet. 'screen' is only used for text; pixel graphics currently go around it. 'data-disk' can't access code, and will eventually include finer-grained restrictions.
It wouldn't have been possible without the lovely folks over on #osdev. And the inspiration of ColorForth (https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/105906716550232992), though I still don't understand how that driver works.
For starters I focused just on making things more discoverable. These files are optimized for opening in your text editor, jumping to definitions to see type signatures, etc. See https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/editor/exuberant_ctags_rc for a ctags configuration for Mu and SubX programs.
