LookAtThat VS Octo

https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat

View, search, and analyze arbitrary source code (best support of Swift right now) in 3D and AR space. You open your phone or tablet, yeet hundreds of files into 3D space, and can start highlighting, moving, and tracing execution by literally walking around your code. The desktop app has similar features, and the standard 3D viewer is just as fun.

I would love help - from anyone of any kind - to build this out towards greater usefulness. It’s a lot of fun, it’s super cool to look at, and it’s the thing I’ve wanted to use since I was a small child.

“Let me touch the words!!”

I feel like I’ve been spamming this everywhere and any time I get the chance, but I really want people to join in and help define this experience with me for developers.

https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat

AR VR for iOS and macOS. Millions of glyphs. Instant control. There’s magic here. If this excites you, work with me and help make this a reality! I don’t have all of it in me.

I wish I did. I don’t. I don’t have all the time and energy. But there are people here that if they spent just a little time to work on this, we would be in the future of a 3D code space in days, and not weeks or months.

I owe a new readme for the project. If any of this makes you feel any feelies, get in contact with me star it, make noise, whatever!

Lotta love to yall. Thanks for letting me vomit words.

I have this mostly working for Swift by thread and execution tracing matched to syntax analysis in https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat.

You can record app execution, and then play it back thread and line and by line to see each line executing in time. It’s kinda fun to see millions of lines flash and highlight and move at 60fps and seeing implicit relationships between executing files and high level functional flows

If I may be so bold as include something I’m working on myself, I’d love to chime in! I’m not functionally complete, but feel like I’m writing an amalgamation of all of the above tools.

https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat

1. Octo, a CHIP-8 assembler: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Octo

P.S. Octojam 10 runs until 12:00 AM PST on November 1st! See the following if you're interested! https://itch.io/jam/octojam-10

In addition to what other posters suggested, it could be a good idea to try assembly languages as a way to manually work with locations in memory. Something like Octo could be fun if you want to try memory manipulation without worrying about real-world complexities like syscalls and memory alignment. If you want something extra challenging, you could always try x86 / amd64 assembly. Some C compilers even support inline assembly if you want to mix C and assembly.

Yes, Octo is the most used tool to create CHIP-8 programs today. John has a little introduction text for writing in its dialect here: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Octo/blob/gh-pages/docs/BeginnersGuide.md

I also want to thank you all for all the advice you gave to me and others about CHIP8. It was very helpful to read some posts here ! I also used John Earnest's OCTO a lot for debugging.

The octo FAQ touches on this "pre-xoring" technique, and theres a worked example of doing this data preparation in macros. I've also written varioustools that can handle the xoring for you.

In my own system, Octo[0], I encode programs and their metadata in a similar steganographic fashion in GIF files. As others have noted here, both GIF and PNG offer extension mechanisms and ways to embed "comments", but popular image-sharing sites universally re-encode images and discard this data. The advantage of GIF over PNG (for my purposes) is that I store an arbitrary payload in a fixed-looking image by creating additional frames of animation.

In the past, I've also used a different technique- if you simply concatenate a PNG onto a JAR (which is really just a ZIP archive) you end up with a file that acts like a PNG unless you change the extension to JAR, in which case it acts like a Java executable. This works because the PNG header is at the beginning of the file, while the ZIP header is at the end. Nowadays, though, desktop Java is pretty much dead, so it's a less exciting party trick.

[0] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Octo