Some IT projects I think about making.

In order to set some of my own thoughts in order I’m going to make a list of some of the projects that I’ve been thinking about. Feel free to give some feedback if you have it.

1. OA Social

A social media site. Explicitly anarchist in it’s implementation.

• Federated (obviously).
• Integrated governance votes with different types of voting: consensus, majority, weighted. Maybe even automatic actions (Defederating, Promoting/Demoting admins/mods, Taking over communities). Should also be available for communities.
• Tiered community membership: outsiders, members, mods. Using chains of trust for members allowing to “kick out” someone and everyone they invited.
• Objections instead of downvotes. Requiring to give reasons and allowing the poster to refute. (an extreme version would allow the poster to remove objections)
• As a silly idea. A dictionary that everyone using the instance would have to agree to use. Giving everyone a common vocabulary.

2. A Programming Language

Currently I’m trying to use zig for everything. But zls is quite iffy. So I’m thinking of making my own language that compiles into zig, (and js for web).

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a couple years now, even before learning about zig. Therefor there are a lot of different versions of this idea.

The most interesting version is a binary language. Every function, variable, and type is only saved as an integer identifier. What every identifier is and does would be saved in a separate text file. This would allow to localise the
code and force documenting the code as every name would be automatically added to the documentation.

The text files would also be split into internal and external ones. Internal would contain the variables, private functions and such. And external text files would act as headers. Giving all the documentation for the items needed to interact with the library/application.

The biggest problem is that I would need to either:

• compile the text source files into these files and then transpile back into whichever language I’m targeting.
• or create a program that operates on the binary files. Designing comfortable UX for programming without relying on text-buffers.
• or create a program which uses a text-buffer and compiles it into the binary format on the go.

Or I could just make a classic text-based language. With a tree-sitter grammar and a LSP.

3. A graphical runtime

While thinking about making these different projects I often think about making my own graphical runtime to allow displaying them. Basically a browser-like program taking some code and using it to display a UI.

The latest iteration, called griz, uses SDL and the Terminus PSF font to create a terminal-like screen. I’m currently stuck figuring out the best way to do host-app communication. WASM? Dynamic Libraries? Pipes? Shared memory?

I don’t like web because JS is slow and WASM requires glue code which is still JS.
And I don’t like native toolkits because they’re very big and cumbersome.
Maybe I should just build an SDL based library.

4. Games

There are of course a lot of different games I’ve been thinking about making Some I’ve even started on, although I never get anywhere because I lose the motivation to keep going and actually finish.

Some of the ideas:

• extract, upgrade, extract. Taking the idea from games like shapez and mindustry. Condensing it into a flash-like upgrade and run cycle.
• Solarpunk courier. a character based cosy game about being a courier in a solarpunk society learning about the history of this society from your dependants (customers).
• Macro scale scavenging and building towns. Creating factions and fighting (or joining) raiders.

EDIT: So piefed puts <br/> at the line ending after you press publish so the weird formatting doesn’t show up on preview. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the preview? And why does it even do that? Single line ending shouldn’t matter for markdown.