supertux VS rnix-parser

SuperTux - Platformer inspired by Mario Brothers. C++, SDL2

Looking at the repo for SuperTux as featured here in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39528726 and trying to understand how the cross platform aspect works. Am I correct in my thoughts that it's OpenGL based, using a cross platform library called Simple DirectMedia Layer aka SDL, found at https://www.libsdl.org?

I see a frequently occurring header file called SDL.h, but when I search the repo at https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux I can't find it.

What is SDL.h and why am I unable to locate it?

Well, there actually is/was a Supertux 2. I don't remember the specifics, I think they rewrote it from blit 2D into OpenGL? You can see here : https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux/blob/master/supertux2.d... that it's called supertux2

But yeah this has nothing to do with the actual content of the levels, it only refers to the engine.

nix run git+https://github.com/supertux/supertux.git?submodules=1

If you know the file name, you can use the "Go to file" button to search for files with some specific name -- e.g. https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux/find/master

Some open source games using C++ include SuperTux, SuperTuxKart, OpenRCT2

I definitely plan to support as much as I can, but there is definitely a level of complexity that can never be truly translated to a graphical tool. What I've found helpful during development for me is that I split the frontend GUI and the backed parser and editor into two projects (nixos-conf-editor and nix-editor), that way I could tackle a lot of the parsing and editing alone without worrying about specific GUI features needed (and use it for other projects). Later when I need some feature I add it to nix-editor. So far nix-editor supports simple attribute modification, array adding and popping, and recursive attribute definition and dereferencing. It's definitely not perfect by any means, but so far it's been enough for the projects I've been working on. I definitely need to credit any success I've had so far to the developers of rnix-parser which translates nix expression to easy to manage ASTs.

I'm hopeful that with https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-parser being a thing now, we can get some better Nix tooling, particularly for stuff like linting and doc extraction.

Okay, yes, I agree with all of that. Flakes are kind of a module system, but having clearer semantics around functions and classes would definitely help with both code readability and producing better stack traces.

And a proper type system would be awesome.

Regarding docs, it is interesting that portions of the nixpkgs source do seem to have docblock-like comments above the functions, but AFAICT there's no formalized process for extracting or rendering those. Given that https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-parser exists, I wonder how big of a leap it would be to actually extract those, render them into rST pages, and generate a searchable Sphinx manual.