millfork VS FFmpeg

Well from the pov of machine or assembly code, C is without a doubt a high level language.

But at the same time it's the lowest-level high-level language.

(there are a couple of interesting 'mid-level' languages for 8-bit processors though, like Millfork: https://github.com/KarolS/millfork)

Take a look at millfork, it's similar to what you're trying to do

There are no doubt some systems still running under emulation doing the same thing as they were 40 years ago. But the truth is CP/M is dead. Long live CP/M!

It's just hobbyists now. One hacker ported his game to a Kaypro under CP/M a couple years ago: http://www.chrisfenton.com/dd9-kaypro-edition/

Much of the focus is on porting CP/M to whatever new or old Z80 system someone has built or found. I can't think of anything particularly dazzling besides the above, in terms of recent new programs, but here are some pointers if you wanted to write something yourself!

RunCPM is a CP/M Z80 virtual machine under modern OSes for development etc. https://github.com/MockbaTheBorg/RunCPM

CP/Mish is an attempt to bring all the free software CP/M tools together. It is to CP/M as Linux is to UNIX, or FreeDOS is to MS-DOS. A mostly complete, improved, libre reimplementation: https://github.com/davidgiven/cpmish

Also from David Given (and not CP/M specific) is Cowgol. Alpha quality. But it's a self-hosted Pascal/Ada-like language with compiler. Runs on 8-bit systems, at least theoretically. It is written, of course, entirely in Cowgol: https://github.com/davidgiven/cowgol

Millfork is a language which targets CP/M systems, among others. It's a whole-program optimizing compiler for a language somewhat lower level than C, with properties that make it very nice to compile for 8-bit systems like no recursion, and no automatic promotion to 16-bit integers in type handling: https://github.com/KarolS/millfork

SDCC supports the platform with C surprisingly well. I wouldn't call it rock-solid but compared to the above toys it is an industrial quality compiler for the Z80. In fact, C seems to be the most common actual language for hobbyist and the little remaining serious Z80 development, probably ahead of assembly.

If it just reads and writes the terminal and can fit in 64 KB, then a port is probably straightforward.

FFmpeg (https://ffmpeg.org/)

GPL2

Since FFmpeg is GPL2, doesn’t that require CompressX to disclose its source code?

IANAL, apologies if I miss understand license requirements.

https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg?tab=License-1-ov-file

This turns out to be a lot of assembly macros to help write one x86 assembly. https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavutil/x86/x...

The sibling comment recommending compiler intrinsics is probably the best way to go for writing SIMD code. A mixture of `` style types and intrinsics to specify instructions is a solid 90% solution compared to assembly.

If you want that last 10%, I think macros are putting the emphasis in the wrong place. They're a somewhat easy way to build up a language abstraction which will work if held carefully, but I'm confident the dev experience using this abstraction when you write invalid code will be deeply confusing.

I would suggest to write a parser instead of the macros. That'll tell you clearly when the syntax is invalid (though possibly not with much precision) and it'll give you a place to put semantic analysis for where valid syntax encodes nonsense. Do the equivalent of the macro expansions on the parsed tree instead of on the text. Emit asm as the "back end".

You might have heard of FFMPEG or ImageMagick for image and video edition in a programmatic way. MoviePy is a Python module for video editing (Python wrapper for FFMPEG and ImageMagick). It provides functions for cutting, concatenations, title insertions, video compositing, video processing, and the creation of custom effects. It can read and write common video and audio formats and be run on any platform with Python 2.7 or 3+.

There are many cloud-based tools and websites that can convert your images, but the problem with these tools is that you usually have to upload the files for them to be processed, and some of their services are not free. In this article, I'd like to introduce a piece of software called FFmpeg, which allows you convert the images locally with one simple command.

To run the demo locally, be sure to have Python 3.11 and FFmpeg installed.