chameco

It'd be a fun exercise to write a tiny Forth in machine code (sans assembler) and use it to write enough of a C compiler to build tcc, or something along those lines. From there I think you can chain old (but accessible) gcc versions up to modern gcc.

First irssi, then WeeChat, then cerce in Emacs.

I lived without X11/Wayland for several years. (These days, I live in GUI Emacs with EXWM instead, which has a similar feeling.)

Some tools I had luck with:

- mpv is your friend - it can play audio, video, and display images directly to the framebuffer without X11. It also makes a pretty decent PDF reader combined with ghostscript to render each page to a PNG.

- The Emacs ecosystem is very useful - there are many packages for interacting with common services, and they typically work in both terminal and GUI modes.

- For web stuff, the best solution I found was to push as much as possible into RSS feeds and/or IRC, which have good terminal clients. Things like rss-bridge and bitlbee are great here. When I needed a browser, I typically used Elinks but was never really satisfied with it. I believe if you need decent JS support you're out of luck.

"We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells."

In any languages with multiple namespaces, anything inhabiting some non-primary namespace (i.e., not the matrix containing normal variables) feel second class. Emphasis "feel", and hence "awkward" over "technically limiting".

Additionally, it makes the transition to lambda calculus more difficult to grok, which somewhat hinders understanding. It's pretty trivial to make some simple rewrite rules from (most of) Scheme to lambda calculus: it's a two-hour project at most. Doing this for CL is much less intuitive/elegant, possibly making it more difficult for those with that sort of theoretical background.

I find that site a bit misguided. Any amount of CSS might still break, for example, w3m. It seems more sensible to have pure HTML sites with client-side styling within the browser.

Ramnode goes pretty low if you have coupon codes (like, $14 per year low), and I believe Digital Ocean is similar.

I have two pieces of advice. First, expand your horizons. Yes, Windows jumping games using a game creator are a great start, but there is so much more. At 12, when I started off, I was writing very similar games, albeit using Python and Pygame rather than JS. Your route is equally valid, with its own unique challenges, and hey, in the end you get the same result. However, from here, the paths begin to branch. While the Windows world you've embraced will lead you to Visual Basic and eventually Visual C++ and C#, you could take another path. At 11, I installed Ubuntu Linux for the first time; at 14, I switched to Arch. This was probably a bad decision, given I knew nothing about the OS and had to essentially re-learn everything. You might be intimidated. Don't be. Learning your way around Unix now will make a world of difference later. By 16, I had written my first compiler, a basic baremetal assembly kernel, and an interpreted language with a decent optimizing compiler and VM. I am still not an amazing programmer, and I still have a lot to learn. Don't doubt yourself because of your age. My second piece of advice ties into the first: don't try to use your age to gain an advantage. Not because it's unfair: because it will bring you more personal validation when people praise you because of the quality of your work rather than how young you are. It's the diffence between making a good program, and making a good program for a teenager. Also, it makes it far easier to find jobs.

Source: My own experiences as the 16-year old (breaking my own rule here for the first time) author of the solid programming language.

P.S. I'm not trying to be arrogant. I just don't want you to repeat my mistakes. Don't be afraid to do things that seem difficult: with research and a little elbow grease, you can accomplish anything, and nothing anyone says can take that away from you.

Yeah, the namespacing is somewhat poor, sorry about that. I'll get around to prefixing the names at some point.

It's been about 6 months total, I think, but there were significant breaks for school and exams.

The VM, the AST parser, and the Bison/Flex frontend are built in a layered manner: you could (with the appropriate Makefile) build only the VM, the VM+the AST parser, or all three. I don't currently have Makefile options for this, but it would be pretty trivial to add.

Without debug symbols (the default Makefile includes them), the executable is 83KB (93KB with -g), less than half the size of Lua. The shared library is a bit larger, at 102KB.

Lua's whole table-metatable system always felt awkward to me, what with the magic names for operators. It's really not so bad, I just didn't see any reason to spend time learning something that felt awkward and archaic to me when I could make something that seemed a bit cleaner.

Thanks! Quite honestly, my primary reason for making it was that I didn't like the Lua object model and Python/Ruby/Guile are a bit inconvenient to embed.