What would happen if someone decided to embed a display server into a game engine? The result could be very similar to the Arcan multimedia framework.

It is difficult to define what Arcan is. It is a collection of tools and libraries to build secure applications with rich multimedia facilities, window management, VR support, etc.

There are several experimental projects built with Arcan. One of them is Durden, an incredible, revolutionary window compositor with support of own, X11, and Wayland clients. Almost every aspect can be customized in runtime, even shaders associated with any graphical element.

The authors of Arcan made it in C and provided an interface for Lua noscripting.

Arcan applications can run on top of other compositors/window systems or be a first-class citizens and start without any help of other environments.

https://arcan-fe.com/about/

#c #lua #graphics #desktop #composer #ui

A couple of days ago I discovered an interesting tutorial on the development of a functional language compiler using C++, Flex, Bison, and LLVM. The author uses approaches found in the book "Implementing functional languages: a tutorial" by Simon Peyton Jones. Very fascinating reading.

https://danilafe.com/blog/00_compiler_intro/

#tutorial #compilers #translation #fprog #haskell

The following page on NesDev Wiki organizes tons of materials about programming for NES starting from the very basics.

https://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Programming_guide

#nes #system #programming #mos6502 #lowlevel

I already wrote about tilde communities — small standalone Unix machines with dozens of users who host their web pages or gopher sites, learn to program, and communicate. It looks like such "social networks for hackers" become popular. There is a central hub collecting links to all tilde machines where you can find your community.

https://tildeverse.org/

#subculture #unix #social #tilde

A brief introduction to anonymous blogging that can be helpful to activists and journalists.

https://uglyduck.ca/blog-anonymously/

#blogging #anonymity

A book about the internals of the NetBSD operating system.

https://www.netbsd.org/docs/internals/en/index.html

#book #osdev #system #programming

Two days ago I read about a new programming language - Vale. This project just did first public steps, but already looked interesting.

In some sense Vale brings to mind Rust: it is based on the idea of single ownership and regions. But obviously it differs a lot and does some things the own way.

Vale uses LLVM and therefore targets many platforms.

I hope eventually the project will bring us a worthy alternative to Rust, Zig and Go.

https://vale.dev/

#compilers #languages #system #programming

Glamorous Toolkit is a sleek modern Smalltalk programming environment built with Pharo.

https://gtoolkit.com

#smalltalk

A friend of mine asked me how to write object-oriented code in non-OOP languages, such as C. There are many articles on this topic, but not all are good. I liked this article by Chris Wellons.

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2014/10/21/

#oop #c

Hey. I need system programmers for the team creating the core of KasperskyOS.

If you know the C language perfectly, understand the architecture of operating systems, have experience of kernel-level development, it would be great to talk at an interview.

We have our microkernel, drivers and system services, a hypervisor, and a security system. There is also a family of DSLs for describing security policies and a compiler for them. In short, a lot of interesting work!

The offices are located in Moscow, near Vodny Stadion and Dynamo metro stations.

Send me a message if interested (@richiefreedom).

A paper on optimizing the IPC fastpath in seL4.

https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/nicta_full_text/5858.pdf

#paper #osdev #microkernel #system #programming

The article at the link below shows an interesting way to hide messages in the binary code of programs for x86-compatible processors.

https://blog.yossarian.net/2020/08/16/Hiding-messages-in-x86-binaries-using-semantic-duals

#steganography #osdev #system #programming #infosec #lowlevel

An interesting project with the crazy goal of building a computer and a complete software stack from scratch. The author shows every step in daily Twitch streams and uploads screencasts to YouTube.

https://github.com/pervognsen/bitwise

#hardware #osdev #compilers #system #programming

A nice free book on cryptography.

http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~rosulekm/crypto/

#book #cryptography #infosec

A page documenting the use of Spin/Promela to verify Plan 9's synchronization primitives.

https://swtch.com/spin/

#synchronization #verification #osdev #spin #promela

ShivyC is a simple compiler for a subset of C11 written in Python. It uses an intermediate representation and allocates registers using George and Appel’s iterated register coalescing algorithm.

https://github.com/ShivamSarodia/ShivyC

#compilers #c #python

A short tutorial on writing a virtual machine that simulates the LC-3 fictional architecture.

https://justinmeiners.github.io/lc3-vm/

#tutorial #vm #fantasycomputer #lowlevel #system #programming #c #cpp

A simple and well-documented microkernel operating system released under public domain.

https://resea.org/

#osdev #system #programming #c #microkernel #cc0 #lowlevel

A hobbyist operating system with GUI written in assembly language for x86_64.

https://github.com/Blackend/Cyjon/

#osdev #system #programming #assembly #lowlevel

A tiny article on simple soft shadows for 2D games.

https://www.rykap.com/2020/09/23/distance-fields/

#gamedev #algorithms #graphics