Process scheduling and multitasking in KnightOS

I’m going to do some blogging about technical decisions made with KnightOS. It’s an open-source project I’ve been working on for the past four years to build an open-source Unix-like kernel for TI calculators (in assembly). It’s been a cool platform on top of which I can research low level systems concepts and I thought I’d share some of my findings with the world.

So, first of all, what is scheduling? For those who are completely out of the loop, I’ll explain what exactly it is and why it’s neccessary. Computers run on a CPU, which executes a series of instructions in order. Each core is not capable of...

Let's compile like it's 1992

I have been tinkering with the vanilla source code of Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. Even though it is more than 20 years old: It still compile and here is how to do it (with plenty of screenshots).

Game Engine Black Books

I am almost done with the first volume of what I hope will become a serie called "Game Engine Black Book". Each book would take further what I tried to do with my articles: Explain simply, yet in great details, a legendary game engine. For the first one I decided to go with Wolfenstein 3D.

2014-08-05

sinit 0.9.1 released: download

New Site

Every 6 years or so I'm revamping my website. This is the 3rd incarnation now (yes, I started early) featuring a new wordpress theme, a clean layout, and – most important – serious content improvements.

Python's datetime sucks

I’ve been playing with Python for about a year now, and I like pretty much everything about it. There’s one thing that’s really rather bad and really should not be that bad, however - date & time support. It’s ridiculous how bad it is in Python. This is what you get with the standard datetime module:

What you don’t get is:

Date and time support is a rather tricky thing to do and it’s something that the standard...

Trespasser: Jurassic Park CG Source Code Review

Jurassic Park: Trespasser is an unique piece of software: It is a game that has managed to reach both infamous and cult status.
Released in October 1998 after a three years development cycle, it was unanimously destroyed by critics. But it did not fail by much and managed to grow an impressive mass of fans that wrote editors, released patches, reverse-engineered the assets, added features, produced new dinosaurs, levels and even started a remake. 20 years later, bloggers still write about it and the post-mortem by Richard Wyckoff is one of the most fascinating behind-the-scene tale I have ever read.
From...

Go's error handling doesn't sit right with me

I’ll open up by saying that I am not a language designer, and I do like a lot of things about Go. I just recently figured out how to describe why Go’s error handling mechanics don’t sit right with me.

If you aren’t familiar with Go, here’s an example of how Go programmers might do error handling:

result, err := SomethingThatMightGoWrong()
if err != nil {
    // Handle error
}
// Proceed

Let’s extrapolate this:

func MightFail() {
    result, err := doStuffA()
    if err != nil {
        // Error handling...


						
						Drew DeVault's blog
						

							Posted at 2014-06-07 00:00:00 | Software | read on
						
					

2014-05-01

ubase 0.1 released: download

Git Source Code Review

Since its release in December 2005, git has taken over the software industry. In combination with GitHub it is now a powerful tool to publish and share code: From big teams (linux kernel, id Software, Epic Unreal) to single individual (Prince of Persia, Another world, Rick Dangerous), many have adopted it as their main SCM.
I wanted to get a better understanding of the "stupid content tracker" and see how it was built so I spent a few weeks in my spare time reading the source code. I found it tiny, tidy, well-documented and overall pleasant to read.
As usual I...