i tried playing a bit of openarena as a self-sacrifice, entirely for scientific purposes. i also tried strace-ing it. the graphics stuff seems to complicated: 9 processes (or threads) and lots of different syscalls, mostly incomprehensible to me ioctl-s and write-s.

it's amazing how smoothly openarena runs on this netbook, and firefox is having difficulties rendering a bunch of rectangles with text

@ngn do you just want to show an image, or an interactive screen with callbacks?

@ktye neither, i was just curious about how things work

@ngn i think the biggest concern with going low level, is that the ioctls depend on the graphics hardware..

@ktye oh.. that's very bad

this is interesting: github.com/remko/waforth it compiles and relinks user functions during runtime.

My first thought was "wow, I wonder how they implement the return stack on top of WASM, given its highly constrained approach to control flow". The answer turns out to be "they don't expose the return stack"

speaking of forth, I completed my triptych: internet-janitor.itch.io/squad

a meaningful k subset, the toenails language, and a forth