I never thought I'd get nostalgia for the UI of Windows XP of all things, that grotesque bastardization of the pure simplicity and utilitarian design perfected by Windows 98. But here we are.
ravetcofx•1mo ago
Uxtal is such a great platform to develop as a rock solid ABI. Very lightweight and stable, yet niche, it really feels like a counter-culture movement to the modern slop, vibe coding and JS that the mainstream is currently at.
theamk•1mo ago
Maybe I spent too much time with *BSD's (and Linux), but I don't see "rock solid ABI" as that useful. If I wanted to make a program that'd still be usable in 50 years, I'd provide source code, in C with minimal dependencies. Sure, the build system is likely to rot, but every modern C compiler supports C89, a 35 year old standard. Just don't go overboard with something like Qt or GTK. And yes, I'll have to constrain myself to not use nice modern libraries.. but those constrains would be much more permissive than all-new isolated "uxtal" VM.
(For the specific application of games / graphics, I'd go with libSDL. Version 1.0 was released in 1998, and my current machine still has "libsdl1.2-compat" installable and supported. But I don't play games much so I know much less about those.)
zzo38computer•1mo ago
There are other implementations of uxn/varvara as well (on many computers); uxn32 can be helpful to run it on Windows. It would also not be too difficult to write your own (I also wrote my own implementation), so uxn/varvara will be compatible with many computers.
publicdebates•1mo ago