tersenet VS DOOM

Is it able to show actual videos or is that just to make the demo more interesting and inserted externally?

I would like to combine something like this with https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet or some of those ideas.

Here's an idea I had that is a bit related https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

Although I may never have time to actually work on it. Especially since it will be a complete waste of time unless I can get a huge number of people to adopt it.

"Writing a browser" (from scratch) at this point basically means you are implementing a type of portable operating-system-in-a-box (the web platform) and that it will be compatible with whatever Google decides to add to theirs.

The browser is so comprehensive in functionality and APIs, and such a challenge to keep up with Google's constant churn of new features and total dominance, that not even Microsoft could do it.

Here is my somewhat related pet project: Tersenet. https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

I loved playing around with Gemini. Something loosely along those lines can definitely work. Who knows what will become popular in the future. Extreme web page bloat leaves the door open.

Here are a couple of other alternative ideas for the web:

https://freenet.org/

https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet (an idea, not implemented)

I might make a new version of this http://vintagesimulator.com with VR support.

Or actually build this https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

What I have been thinking about for a few years is a SaaS that takes a video stream and in real-time outputs a 3d reconstruction with separate posed meshes, or maybe even some type of (CAD-like) boundary representation.

It should be possible to use NeRFs to create a VR "teleportation" application.

Also I think that VR or mixed reality user interfaces should be 3D and possibly haptic, and that doing everything in 2d windows in VR doesn't make much sense. So there will eventually be an OS for mixed reality that has 3D widgets or components that can interact and have interesting interfaces.

It will also soon be possible to "clone" a person using dynamic NeRF-like technology combined with new multimodal models of behavior and cognition. Such as take every script from the Colbert show, feed it into a model that combines a LLM with gestures and some visual/spatial correspondence. Automatically create a late night monologue.

Seems really interesting so I have been Googling to try to figure out what you are talking about. Is the Hydraulic product a way to easily deploy GraalVM software? And maybe by adding some type of search and document browsing capability, it can become a new type of web browser?

Could you take a look at my comment in this thread and also at https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

I have not totally updated that but my current thinking is that we really want to finish deconstructing the overlay operating system that the "web browser" has become. For example, we should actually not bundle the information browsing program and application VM together, but rather have a simple standard for them to work together. Such as, the info browser can save the list of the application binaries to a file that the VM system knows to watch.

We also actually want to further decompose this into a multilevel window manager concept. On the first level, just a rule that applications save and reload window layouts.

I really think it should be a goal to standardize on some web assembly extension with simple UI features like canvas or framebuffer and keyboard events.

We should be working on an alternative paradigm. https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

Wow hello famous person.

This weekend I got back to doing a little bit of work on my TerseNet concept, inspired by one of your articles "https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n..." and things like the Gemini Protocol with the idea of combating monopolies by making protocols simple enough for the average programmer or small team to implement them.

https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet -- still just some ideas, not an actual prototype.

commercially exploit or use for any commercial purpose."

[1] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/commit/4eb368a960647c8cc...

The original Doom had third-party audio playback routines, so the source came with a rewritten sound server: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/tree/master/sndserv

    The bad news:  this code only compiles and runs on linux.  We couldn't

Here's a repo for you with no test coverage and no auto-generated DI. They using unsafe pointers all over the place, too!

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM

Shall I prepare the postage for the letter in which you'll call John Carmack an MBA? Should we send another to Chris Sawyer? I heard he didn't even write a formal design doc for Roller Coaster Tycoon!

cURL is one of the most used C libs and is an example of good quality C code. If you follow the style used there, see e.g. https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/lib/dynhds.h (and associated dynhds.c) you will be good.

Looking at the source of some of the old game-engines from the era that have since been released as open-source can also be helpful, like https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM.

In both cases notice how simple and elegant a lot of the code is. There is already enough complexity inherent in the problem they are solving, and that is where the focus should be.

Any IDE with a working language server to make it easy to jump around and refactor should work fine. Limitations might be due to the C language itself?

Error handling on such a fixed platform does not need to be super-advanced. You should always be within the confines of the system so there shouldn't be much that can go wrong. If stuff goes wrong anyway just being able call a function Fatal("FooBar failed with code 34") when unexpected stuff happens and have it log somewhere to be able to dig around should be enough. You never need to be able to recover and retry.

Make sure to use https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html or a similar tool when developing outside of the PSOne.

That said, consider statically allocating global buffers for most stuff and avoid using the heap for most stuff.

Good luck working within the confines of the PSOne! Many hackers have pulled the hair from their head on that platform ;)

Probably more easily than you'd think. DOOM is open source[1], and as GP alludes, is probably the most frequently ported game in existence, so its source code almost certainly appears multiple times in GPT-4's training set, likely alongside multiple annotated explanations.

[1] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM

I'd define an arena as the pattern where the arena itself owns N objects. So you free the arena to free all objects.

My first job was at EA working on console games (PS2, GameCube, XBox, no OS or virtual memory on any of them), and while at the time I was too junior to touch the memory allocators themselves, we were definitely not malloc-ing and freeing all the time.

It was more like you load data for the level in one stage, which creates a ton of data structures, and then you enter a loop to draw every frame quickly. There were many global variables.

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Wikipedia calls it a region, zone, arena, area, or memory context, and that seems about right:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region-based_memory_management

It describes history from 1967 (before C was invented!) and has some good examples from Apache ("pools") and Postgres ("memory contexts").

I also just looked at these codebases:

https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public (based on code from the 70's)

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM (1997)

I looked at allocproc() in xv6, and gives you an object from a fixed global array. A lot of C code in the 80's and 90's was essentially "kernel code" in that it didn't have an OS underneath it. Embedded systems didn't run on full-fledges OSes.

DOOM tends to use a lot of what I would call "pools" -- arrays of objects of a fixed size, and that's basically what I remember from EA.

Though in g_game.c, there is definitely an arena of size 0x20000 called "demobuffer". It's used with a bump allocator.

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So I'd say

- malloc / free of individual objects was NEVER what C code looked like (aside from toy code in college)

- arena allocators were used, but global vars and pools are also very common.

- arenas are more or less wash for memory safety. they help you in some ways, but hurt you in others.

The reason C programmers don't malloc/free all the time is for speed, not memory safety. Arenas are still unsafe.

When you free an arena, you have no guarantee there's nothing that points to it anymore.

Also, something that shouldn't be underestimated is that arena allocators break tools like ASAN, which use the malloc() free() interface. This was underscored to me by writing a garbage collector -- the custom allocator "broke" ASAN, and that was actually a problem:

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/01/garbage-collector.html

If you want memory safety in your C code, you should be using ASAN (dynamically instrumented allocators) and good test coverage. Arenas don't help -- they can actually hurt. An arena is a trivial idea -- the problem is more if that usage pattern actually matches your application, and apps evolve over time.

Doom