90s_dev

> The Berry interpreter-core's code size is less than 40KiB and can run on less than 4KiB heap

I did not see that on the front page. Thanks for pointing it out.

My mind shut down about 49 days ago.

Oh, they say it was inspired by Lua. So it's more like Wren I guess, but probably less performant than Wren too[1]. And less powerful than Lua since Lua metatables are half magic half genius. Still, I'd like to see a benchmark like this.

[1] https://wren.io/performance.html

This seems to have almost the exact same feature set and use-case as Lua. How does it compare in performance? I doubt it can be faster than Lua 5.5

What a nice dream.

Oh I forgot there would be a weekly newsletter (posted on the mailing list) and an official catalog of new apps/games in the newsletter.

I also thought of how we could create a site that lets you sign up and upload your shareware games and uses public/private key pairs to generate license keys upon purchase which your app validates with the public key at runtime.

Apps would have to be compiled to wasm bytecode or lua bytecode for that to work though and not be easily crackable.

Too little too late I guess.

Maybe I worded it wrong. I want to develop my app in VS Code. I have gotten so very used to everything about how VS Code works over the past 10 years, that Visual Studio feels so unintuitive and backwards and weird. But VS is the king of C development on Windows apparently. That said, I've made some progress getting VS Code to work with the official Microsoft plugins for both C/C++ and CMake, both inside WSL and outside of it, though nothing that doesn't feel somewhat hacky.

\<rant>

From all that I've experienced in the past few weeks dealing with C projects and various build systems and operating systems, I suspect that using Zig would work perfectly as an easy cross-platform alternative to CMake. Until I open up my code in VS Code and the C/C++ plugin just doesn't work, no auto-completion, no go-to-definition, syntax highlighting is broken, etc., and all because it can't find the files in places it ordinarily expects them to be. And maybe there will be some hacky way to fix it with a setting for the VS Code plugin, but likely not.

I'm not saying this is the case, but literally none of the setups I tried feels non-hacky so far, and every one of them has at least one noticable problem during development. I truly miss the days of writing apps for a single platform using its own native build tools. Maybe that's what I'll do: write this as a native Windows app using Visual Studio (ugh, such an awful editor though) and then if I get sales, port it to Mac OS X 10 using Xcode.app, and compile it for Linux inside WSL with GCC 15.

\</rant>

Unused variables stops all further compilation, so that even future errors can't be seen until the variable is used.

That works out great, since all the libraries I need are C or have C wrappers anyway. I might actually do this, thanks.

I don't mind breaking changes if I can fix them within a day.

What bothers me with C/C++ is how difficult it is to cross compile a simple Windows + SDL app from inside WSL without MSVC installed.

I've spent weeks on this.

If Zig saves me from that nightmare, and still lets me use C++ libraries, I will gladly switch over to it.

It claims to be on par with LuaJIT. Makes me a bit suspicious. How does it achieve this?

Intuition and logic are the two halfs of reason (logos). We sometimes have a reason that we can't put into words (logos) but we know intuitively.

The internet is too big, it didn't used to be this way :(

Does anyone still use IRC? I thought freenode died?

SEEKING WORK RELUCTANTLY

I don't really have that many skills.

The most complex thing I've made is https://docs.os.90s.dev/

Email me if it matches up with stuff you need done: admin@90s.dev

As a TypeScript fan, I was really happy to read pretty much every one of these changes. This is a language I wouldn't personally use unless it gains massive traction, but one that I hope it gains massive traction so that I can justify spending the time memorizing and learning all these new language additions.

It's particularly exciting that they constantly rebase upstream Lua, and plan to update it to be compatible with Lua 5.5. Especially because Lua 5.5 finally has the ability to turn off globals!

Some features like break N and default function args seem to be incompatible with the vanilla lua vm.

Tried the reddit thing, funny story. I tried to post to the wasm sub and it said it was restricted. I posted to webdev and they said maybe try posting it at the programminglanguages sub. So I tried there and they deleted it! I don't understand anyone anymore.

Basically a more convenient/intuitive Lua for JS/C/Java/C++ users, plus optional static typing. May in fact use this instead of Lua.

Wait, was this language guided by AI???

Oh hey you're the guy who made the crafting interpreters book, that was really helpful when I went through my wanting to make a langauge phase, thanks for making a great book.

Also yeah seems like they reinvented null pointer crashes but with extra steps.

Oh yeah, in fact that's where I saw it and what made me think to post it here. Oops.

Right, so check if it's null. In practice, you do it just as often in C as you check for std::nullopt in C++ or std::option::ok in Rust etc.

C has non-nullable types too. Only one type can be null in C, and in that event it signifies an absence of a value of that type.

They didn't announce it, I posted it here out of curiosity to see what other people think about it. I hope they're not very upset about that ':)

As I looked up Carbon over the past week, every comment on it was always that nobody uses it because it's going to be eventually https://killedbygoogle.com/

Best of both worlds of Rust and Zig? C/C++ ABI compatibility? No runtime? Borrow checking with less strictness? Seems too good to be true.

See also https://www.ethiocloud.com/bunnascript.aspx and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

I am making a few programs that takes everything I've learned from the 6 months writing 90s.dev and turns them into useful applications. One of them I'm going to release within a few weeks, it aims to be a modern dos+qbasic experience. Another one aims to modernize the experience of having a new computer that does almost nothing and you have to program it in assembly to get it to do stuff, except it'll use wasm (see my Ask HN post for details) with wamr+llvm for near-native performance and SDL3 for full GPU capabilities, and it's called hram.dev (H-RAM = hand-rolled assembly machine). That one needs a little more time to bake, so I have to release the qbasic+dos thing first to keep the lights on. Still thinking of a name...