General Development Archive

For launch, the price was $4.99. I may play with that some over time. I was originally thinking $2.99 and a bunch of folks on Twitter said $4.99 was better. Anyway, Redacted was #8 top paid in the US and #1 top paid in Graphics at the end of launch day. It was also at the top of Product Hunt with 538 up votes! Wow!

The BBC will be giving away mini-computers to 11-year-olds across the country as part of its push to make the UK more digital.

One million Micro Bits - a stripped-down computer similar to a Raspberry Pi - will be given to all pupils starting secondary school in the autumn term.

The BBC is also launching a season of coding-based programmes and activities.

I'm a programmer. I write games. Games programmers get a lot of respect, but none of them, not me, not Carmak, and not Abrash. None of them deserve the honour which I want to bestow on David Horne. This is because David Horne wrote the greatest program ever written: 1k chess on the ZX81.

David Horne is not an urban myth. David Horne achieved what many would even now consider impossible. He wrote a chess game, with AI, that ran on a poorly documented, buggy machine that contained only 1k of memory.

Fans of Apple's Swift language can now use their newly developed skills to write software for systems supporting both .NET and Java, including Android.

The Silver compiler, currently in beta, compiles Swift programs to run in the .NET and Java runtimes. It can also produce native binaries to run on OS X. With Silver, Swift developers can share their business logic and non-interface code across the different platforms.

We've spoken in the past about teaching Clang to fully support Windows and be compatible with MSVC. Until now, a big missing piece in this story has been debugging the clang-generated executables. Over the past 6 months, we've started working on making LLDB work well on Windows and support debugging both regular Windows programs and those produced by Clang.

Today, we're excited to release the alpha version of Rust 1.0, a systems programming language with a focus on safety, performance and concurrency.

This release marks a huge milestone for Rust and its community.

Today we announce Go 1.4, the fifth major stable release of Go, arriving six months after our previous major release Go 1.3. It contains a small language change, support for more operating systems and processor architectures, and improvements to the tool chain and libraries. As always, Go 1.4 keeps the promise of compatibility, and almost everything will continue to compile and run without change when moved to 1.4.

Apple's App Store design is a big part of the problem. The dominance and prominence of "top lists" stratifies the top 0.02% so far above everyone else that the entire ecosystem is encouraged to design for a theoretical top-list placement that, by definition, won't happen to 99.98% of them. Top lists reward apps that get people to download them, regardless of quality or long-term use, so that's what most developers optimize for. Profits at the top are so massive that the promise alone attracts vast floods of spam, sleaziness, clones, and ripoffs.

Quality, sustainability, and updates are almost irrelevant to App Store success and usually aren't rewarded as much as we think they should be, and that's mostly the fault of Apple's lazy reliance on top lists instead of more editorial selections and better search.

As the economics get tighter, it becomes much harder to support the lavish treatment that developers have given apps in the past, such as full-time staffs, offices, pixel-perfect custom designs of every screen, frequent free updates, and completely different iPhone and iPad interfaces.

I always find it more effective to learn new programming concepts by building projects using them, so I decided to do the same for Apple's new Swift language. I also wanted to see how well it would interact with my open source GPUImage framework. As a result, I made GPUImage fully Swift-compatible and I've built and committed to the GitHub repository a couple of Swift sample applications. I wanted to write down some of the things that I learned when building these.

The last few days I spend some time on porting the beloved game DOOM to the ZPU CPU. For you who don't know what I am talking about, DOOM was a ground breaking game released in early 90. ZPU is not only a russian AA gun but also a 32 bit open source CPU.

I gave a talk in 2007 that explained 8088 Corruption in detail, and in that talk I explained that displaying FMV using CGA in graphics mode would be impossible. This is because CGA graphics mode uses 8x the amount of video memory that 8088 Corruption was handling. Even a simple calculation assuming 24fps video reveals that the amount of data needing to be updated per second (24fps * 16KB = 384KB/s) is outside of the IBM PC's capability: CGA RAM can only be changed at a rate of 240KB/s, and most hard drives of the era operate at roughly 90KB/s. It sure felt impossible, so that's why I said it.

Then I thought about the problem for 7 years.