In the process I spent a long time tracking down a stray TODO in 108write.subx
that I thought would abort but didn't since the switch to baremetal.
Then after I reintroduced that assertion I had to go track down a bunch
of buffer sizes. Stream sizes continue to be a huge mess.
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.
We now have a couple of protections:
- if we get close to running out of space in the trace we drop in an
error
- if we run out of space in the trace we stop trying to append
- if there are errors we cancel future evaluations
This is already much nicer. You can't do much on the Mu computer, but at
least it gracefully gives up and shows its limitations. On my computer
the Mu shell tries to run computations for about 20s before giving up.
That seems at the outer limit of what interactivity supports. If things
take too long, test smaller chunks.
Mu's keyboard handling is currently a bit of a mess, and this commit might
be a bad idea.
Ideally keyboards would return Unicode. Currently Mu returns single bytes.
Mostly ASCII. No support for international keyboards yet.
ASCII and Unicode have some keyboard scancodes grandfathered in, that don't
really make sense for data transmission. Like backspace and delete. However,
other keyboard scancodes don't have any place in Unicode. Including arrow keys.
So Mu carves out an exception to Unicode for arrow keys. We'll place the
arrow keys in a part of Unicode that is set aside for implementation-defined
behavior (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#C1_controls):
0x80: left arrow
0x81: down arrow
0x82: up arrow
0x83: right arrow
The order is same as hjkl for mnemonic convenience. I'd _really_ to follow
someone else's cannibalization here. If I find one later, I'll switch to
it.
Applications that blindly assume the keyboard generates Unicode will have
a bad time. Events like backspace, delete and arrow keys are intended to
be processed early and should not be in text.
With a little luck I won't need to modify this convention when I support
international keyboards.
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
Max Bernstein