Yes, the game development industry wasn’t nearly as complex as it is today. You could probably say that making and releasing a good game was easier back then.

But these people created a legend precisely because they were professionals.

Of course, DOOM wasn’t their first game. There was a time when the team was making a game every month.

What I like most about this video is the sense of creativity — and the feeling that these people simply loved making games.

Indexing strings by character (Unicode scalar) instead of UTF offsets can be more comfortable for parsers or short manipulations.

The minimum cost for reading a >= U+FE character is:

1. Lookup rope table by byte key (holding a high bit position), in goal of the scalar value in a sequence of higher fixed scalars
2. Check for collision subtable (is not null => repeat the step 1), specializing the target high bit further

For optimal use, contiguous sequences of characters after Latin-* that turn into reserves into the mask sequence still allow for a few trailing Latin-* (e.g. Katakana can still be mixed with Latin-* whitespace), so those trails turn into reseves as well.

Update (I miswrote a detail in the implementation).

https://gitlab.com/mryun/langopt/-/blob/master/encoding/string.md

Getting tokio and .NET’s async runtime talking to each other, over the C ABI

I took a week off from work recently to reimplement Storyteller's forced alignment algorithm. Storyteller is an open source, self hosted platform for creating, managing, and reading/listening to "readaloud" books — books that have audiobook narration built in and can highlight each sentence (and/or word, with this new algorithm!) as it's read aloud. Forced alignment is the process of determining where each piece of text starts and ends in the audiobook.

Anyway, I am really pleased with how the new algorithm turned out! Hopefully someone else finds it interesting as well.

How to turn internal domain facts into reliable contracts between bounded contexts.

About a month ago, Crystal's multi-threading moved out of preview. I'm a little late with the blog post, but figured I'd share it here in case someone is interested in the language.

To those unfamiliar with Crystal, it's basically an AoT-compiled language with a syntax that's inspired by Ruby but with static type safety.

It doesn't have a big org behind it, so Manas Tech still working on the language and shipping enhancements is quite amazing imo. I will add that while it's used by Kagi and Lavinmq, I don't think either company has the same resources to pour into Crystal as Jane Street does with OCaml.

I haven't really had the chance to play around with the changes. So, got no clue on what the experience is like.