@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe I can’t believe Trace and Edgewall Software is still around and in use 🤣

New post: 2025 - A Year in review (https://www.itsericwoodward.com/journal/2025/12-31-year-in-review.html)

Happy New Year, everyone!

At around 19 seconds in the video, you can see some minor graphical glitches.

Text mode applications in Unix terminals are such a mess. It’s a miracle that this works at all.

In the old DOS days, you could get text (and colors) on the screen just by writing to memory, because the VGA memory was mapped to a fixed address. We don’t have that model anymore. To write a character to a certain position, you have to send an escape sequence to move the cursor to that position, then more escape sequences to set the color/attributes, then more escape sequences to get the cursor to where you actually want it. And then of course UTF-8 on top, i.e. you have no idea what the terminal will actually do when you send it a “🙂”.

Mouse events work by the terminal sending escape sequences to you (https://www.xfree86.org/current/ctlseqs.html#Mouse%20Tracking).

ncurses does an amazing job here. It’s fast (by having off-screen buffers and tracking changes, so it rarely has to actually send full screen updates to the terminal) and reliable and works across terminals. Without the terminfo database that keeps track of which terminal supports/requires which escape sequences, we’d be lost.

But gosh, what a mess this is under the hood … Makes you really miss memory mapped VGA and mouse drivers.

On my way to having windows and mouse support:

https://movq.de/v/95bbbbd3e8/basic-windows.mp4

It would be cool to have something like Turbo Vision eventually.

(I considered just using Turbo Vision, but it’s a C++ library and that’s not quite what I’m looking for. But it’s not yet completely off the table.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I haven’t spoken to a single person yet who was a fan of all this. Not even the more conservative family members.

Some people have detonated several really loud bombs yesterday. This wasn’t a “Böller”. It shook my walls, doors, windows. Family members in other parts of the country reported the same … Is this a new trend?

@javivf@adn.org.es Happy New Year! Let’s hope so. 😂

The only good thing about this absolute craziness is that I can restock my rocket sticks. I picked up twelve along the way. Unfortunately, it looks like 99.999% of ammunition is bombs instead of rockets. Some sections of my street look exactly like an arbitrary Pakistanian town that I’ve seen online.

There was surprisingly much snow in the woods. Also, all ponds have frozen over. I didn’t expect that. Not at all. There were even illegal ice skating tracks in the natural reserve. We came across a large puddle and it was at least 10cm solid ice to the ground. Crazy!

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-01/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s actually not nearly as half bad as I really thought it would be. Just having to eventually deal with the “lowering down” to machine code / ARM64 assembly in the end once you’ve verified the semantics in the VM.

@prologic@twtxt.net Not bad for a start, ey! Looking forward to see you going down these rabbit holes and opening one can of worms after the other. :‘-D Very, very impressive, hats off to you. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org A “Hello World” binary is ~372KB in size. I currently have peephole optimization and deac code optimizations in play, and a few other performance related ones, but nothing too fancy. I have a test case that ensures fib(35) doesn’t regress too badly as I continue to evolve the language.

@prologic@twtxt.net Can you just make them optional? :-) But that of course complicates things.

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s impressive. How large are the resulting binaries? You don’t have any optimizations in place yet, do you?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I hid in the workshop with earmuffs for the absolute worst part.

@javivf@adn.org.es Heck yeah, let’s do this! :-) Welcome to 2026.

Opinion / Question time…

Do you think Mu (µ)’s native compiler and therefore emitted machine code “runtime” (which obviously adds a bit of weight to the resulting binary, and runtime overheads) needs to support “runtime stack traces”, or would it be enough to only support that in the bytecode VM interpreter for debuggability / quick feedback loops and instead just rely on flat (no stacktraces) errors in natively built compiled executables?

So in effect:

Stack Traces:

• Bytecode VM Interpreter: ✅
  
• Native Code Executables: ❌