*2020: Flood-filling the Mu computer*

A year ago I had a prototype of a C-level programming language mapping 1:1 to Assembly that I _thought_ could be type-safe.

Since then, I:

* wrote an academic paper on it
* made it type-safe
* began a high-level language atop it
* got into video, with 15 2-minute screencasts
* and ran programs written in it on bare metal, without an OS, like, 5 years before I expected to.

❤️ to everyone who inspired, taught, debated, encouraged.

https://github.com/akkartik/mu

My 2020 wrap-up is turning into a bit of a rabbit hole:

http://akkartik.name/post/mu-2020

I ended up trying to create a Wardley Map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map) for Mu.

https://github.com/akkartik/mu

*Rendering text atop baremetal*

Mu can now render text atop baremetal x86.

Try clicking around from http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/baremetal/ex5.mu.html

The boot-up machine code reads a few sectors from disk, configures a keyboard handler, and loads a bitmap font (2KB for ASCII, with the option for more).

I use GNU Unifont. I believe that means Mu is now GPL v2. So stated. IANAL and I try not to think about software IP. But a font? Copyright seems reasonable there.

Next up: a text editor!

https://github.com/akkartik/mu

*A more international interface for rendering text*

New 2-minute video: https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-2021-01-12

You get just one fixed screen resolution: 1024x768, 256 colors. Widely available on modern machines, no drivers needed.

You get just one fixed-width bitmap font. No bold/italics, no anti-aliasing.

BUT it won't make assumptions about English and left-to-right order. I eventually want anybody to be able to customize it to their language.

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

I've been trying to visualize the default 256-color palette I get on baremetal.

http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/baremetal/vga_palette.html

To my eyes it looks like I can/should just live in the first 128 colors.

I built a game of "snakes", but it came out more like an etch-a-sketch 😄

http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/baremetal/ex7.mu.html

Play it on any non-windows:

```
git clone https://github.com/akkartik/mu
cd mu
./translate_mu_baremetal_emulated baremetal/ex7.mu
qemu-system-i386 disk.img
```

h/j/k/l to draw

I made an art! On a computer without an OS.

https://github.com/akkartik/mu

It took a while, but I've finally ported a pre-existing Mu program to baremetal: an RPN calculator.

This was _hard_, purely because of cursor management. I have a greater appreciation for everything that display hardware and terminal emulators provide for text mode. Mu so far puts the onus on the programmer.

http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/baremetal/rpn.mu.html

In the end it's interesting to visualize the changes I had to make:

vim -d apps/rpn.mu baremetal/rpn.mu

They're entirely in `main`; the rest is unchanged.

@akkartik Such an exciting project. Congrats on the progress!

@akkartik well done! It has been nice to see it mature

@akkartik the title O_o

@akkartik Welcome to the middle layer.

@akkartik YEEEEEEEEES!

@akkartik
ed?

@akkartik so cool! I’m so glad someone is seriously doing this work. A really great experiment — hopefully it shows us all a fundamentally new way to do things!

@akkartik regarding your overall goal of communicating a codebase, you may be interested in my FuzzySet interactive documentation which attempts to give the best possible human explanation of the code library: http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/

@akkartik instead of building from the code "up" I tried to design from the UI "down" — what UI do we need in order to communicate programs really well and then how can we change programming so those explanations just fall out.

I love your approach of rebuilding the foundations, though! Can't wait to see where it ends up

@glench My hope is to meet somewhere in the middle with all the people doing cool UI research!