The Uxn Ecosystem
100r.co
100r.co
In another life maybe.
Pun intended, I suppose.
There's so much cool stuff in there.
https://merveilles.town/@neauoire
and the instance created by them hosts a rather fine community of people:
Of course Youtube’s algorithm being Youtube’s algorithm and capitalism being capitalism a large part of those sailing videos is bikini content. But at the same time a large part of the sailing existence is repairing, renovating and upgrading their small yachts, from fiberglassing to solar to watermaking. As you say, a peek into a fascinating existence.
“Wilding sailing,” on the other hand, is a much more ambitious labor fest, with the boat owner restoring a catamaran he bought for 2k Euros. That’s been inspiring, entertaining, and really worth subscribing to.
Also impressed that it runs on a lot of real hardware apparently. I have seen many VM projects but they seem kind of isolated within other computers.
The extreme constraints definitely push the design in a different direction
Weathering Software Winter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34219654 - Jan 2023 (28 comments)
We're afraid to take chances, to explore ideas, to take a slightly harder path or to explore difficult challenges. We're risk averse and we're unwilling to try new things. Reading about their trips, about all the work they do on the boat and their approach to code (love the concept of making software for one person!) makes me feel like a coward and how I would love to be more brave about how I deal with code, life and the environment around me...
I appreciate all your work Rek and Devine. I'm glad yo see you busy doing nothing...
I strongly recommend the podcast episode with him at Future of Coding: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044.html and the follow up where he talks about Orca, his incredible live music environment: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/045.html
He's, along with the old Lispers on these forum, the reason why I'm spending so much time thinking about alternative computing and niche programming languages. Uxn is on my todo list, I'm busy with the Smalltalk family these days before diving in on Forth and Uxn :)
It says "they/them" right there on the mastodon profile you linked.
Some fun stuff in there, for the chef/cooking types around here.
Altough the complexity would skyrocket.
Then, if I wanted to write an adventure in Spanish I would omit the tildes, starting question/interrogation symbols and I would map ñ to ny.
That's not an inherent limitation of the VM at least, just of the current software ecosystem. It would be possible and practical to make a tiny unifont-based Unicode text library. Though handling bidirectional text, joined scripts and vertical scripts would be something else… :(
Some fonts for uxn (look at the ~rabbit repos at git.sr.ht) already bring extended chars.
Making a bespoke ASCII extension would be a step back - by about 30 years. You don't need a lot of code to support UTF8; if you're concerned about runtime memory usage, you can make your rune type take 8 bits and support only the U+0000-00FF range[1]. It happens to cover all of [áéíóüñ] and a whole bunch of other languages - unfortunately, not my native one, which would leave me gravely upset ;P
Unicode is also just a representation for text, and a handful of common operations - you work with arrays of characters, rather than arrays of bytes. It was worth its cost on 1992 hardware; Nintendo DS is over a decade more recent.
I recommend studying libutf in sbase[0]. It's not a single header file solution (although utf.h[1] is an excellent place to start reading), but it does provide a fairly comprehensive implementation. There's also a good introduction to Unicode in Plan 9's C programming guide[2]. Even if you choose to only support runes that fit in a single byte, you gain the ability to tell byte blobs apart from text, which is useful both for reasoning about your program, and for future-proofing it, in case you needed to put places like Łódź or Πάτρα on your map.
[0]: http://git.suckless.org/sbase
2. Sometimes it might, but that has nothing to do with uxn. Sometimes it isn't helpful to be differentiated anyways, and sometimes this differentiating byte arrays from text causes problems, too (it isn't really so uncommon).
3. The niju program does not use Unicode and does not need it; it works better without it. If you do want more sophisticated Japanese text, even then there are better ways than using Unicode.
I design my own programs and specifications to avoid Unicode as much as possible, even when multilingual text (sometimes even in languages that Unicode does not have) is desirable.
Good for GB style games without battling the Z80-like instructions and without worring if you would burn the physical LCD on a weird cycle timing bug on displaying sprites.