Longer name, but it doesn't lie. We have no data structure right now for
combining multiple code points. And it makes no sense for the notion of
a grapheme to conflate its Unicode encoding.
Unix text-mode terminals transparently support utf-8 these days, and so
I treat utf-8 sequences (which I call graphemes in Mu) as fundamental.
I then blindly carried over this state of affairs to bare-metal Mu,
where it makes no sense. If you don't have a terminal handling
font-rendering for you, fonts are most often indexed by code points and
not utf-8 sequences.
We'll need this when rendering 16-bit glyphs. They'll occupy two
8x16 display units on screen, but the grapheme is a single unit as far
as fake screens are concerned.
Filling pixels isn't a rare corner case. I'm going to switch to a dense
rather than sparse representation for pixels, but callers will have to
explicitly request the additional memory.
Baremetal is now the default build target and therefore has its sources
at the top-level. Baremetal programs build using the phase-2 Mu toolchain
that requires a Linux kernel. This phase-2 codebase which used to be at
the top-level is now under the linux/ directory. Finally, the phase-2 toolchain,
while self-hosting, has a way to bootstrap from a C implementation, which
is now stored in linux/bootstrap. The bootstrap C implementation uses some
literate programming tools that are now in linux/bootstrap/tools.
So the whole thing has gotten inverted. Each directory should build one
artifact and include the main sources (along with standard library). Tools
used for building it are relegated to sub-directories, even though those
tools are often useful in their own right, and have had lots of interesting
programs written using them.
A couple of things have gotten dropped in this process:
- I had old ways to run on just a Linux kernel, or with a Soso kernel.
No more.
- I had some old tooling for running a single test at the cursor. I haven't
used that lately. Maybe I'll bring it back one day.
The reorg isn't done yet. Still to do:
- redo documentation everywhere. All the README files, all other markdown,
particularly vocabulary.md.
- clean up how-to-run comments at the start of programs everywhere
- rethink what to do with the html/ directory. Do we even want to keep
supporting it?
In spite of these shortcomings, all the scripts at the top-level, linux/
and linux/bootstrap are working. The names of the scripts also feel reasonable.
This is a good milestone to take stock at.
Kartik K. Agaram