I've been thinking about yesterday's post and how I might make some incremental progress towards making a tool like the one described in that post. In a way a text editor and more so SwyftWare is already that, just with a single language renderer (BASIC). I've really been focused on how to make a renderer or tool for OpenSCAD code because the degradation of that project thanks to the AI Industry is on my mind.
I'm also thinking about that project "K" I've been studying each day and how that plays a role; could it be a platform for such an interface? I don't see why not, and in fact the more I think about it, it's a perfect platform, but it's not ready yet.
"K" is currently, as far as I know, implemented as an emulation of a future hardware platform. This makes it particularly interesting for the purpose of realizing my text user interface ideas because emulations are portable. While my end goal is a portable piece of hardware, the ability for me (and others) to use the same environment across whatever hardware is available is very attractive. I've written about this sort of thing before...
The thing that gives me pause at the moment is that K's system programming language is still under construction, which means programming K is at the moment done in assembly language or C. I enjoy C and don't mind assembly, but for a project like this I'd really rather implement it in the language that will be the general foundation of the system instead of writing it in C and then having to port it later.
But maybe I'll do it anyway... The main reason I haven't just started hacking out a version of this in Go is that I've yet to find a simple, portable way to do basic graphics programming in Go (just putting pixels on the screen), and I already know how to do that on the K. This barrier has confounded me for ages honestly from the first time I tried to write some VR software for Linux. I don't know why it's so hard and yet so easy on the 8-bit micros of my youth.
Anyway, lots of threads to pull after yesterday's post.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026