Building native compilers is hard 🤣 Building bytecode VM / interpreters is way easier 🤣

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Very cool! 😎

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Nice! 👍

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks! 🙏

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Nah it’s more like there’s a lot of repeated code, because when you go from source language to intermediate representation to machine code, well you just end up writing a lot of the same patterns over and over again. I need to dedupe this I think.

@kiwu@twtxt.net Ooof 😢 That’s rough!

The compiler technique I’m using here is to not “emit” most of the runtime if it’s actually never used in your program, and also dropping dead code in the SSA pass.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’ve managed to bring a simple “Hello World!” in mu (µ) (at least on macOS / Darwin / ARM64) down to ~86KB (previously ~146KB) 🥳

Hmmm I need to figure out a way to reduce the no. of lines of code / complexity of the ARM64 native code emitter for mu (µ). It’s insane really, it’s a whopping ~6k SLOC, the next biggest source file is the compiler at only ~800 SLOC 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think I can get binaries even smaller with a bit more work and effort 🤔 But yeah still working on the native code generation (at least for macOS targets)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh that’s fine, Mu can compile to native code and so far binaries. at least on macOS are in the order of Kb in size 😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’d be cool if you could get µ (Mu) running in your little toyOS 🤣 You’d technically only have to swap out the syscall() builtin for whatever your toy OS supports 🤔

@thecanine@twtxt.net I see 🤔 Very cool though! 😎

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I watched a few of these thanks to you! Very cool shit™ 😎

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ooof that’s chilly 🥶

that’s a whopping 36°C today 🥵

@dce@hashnix.club merry Christmas to you too!

@thecanine@twtxt.net Is it because you’ve used white pixels around it to sort of give it aht 3D look? 👀 Hmm? 🤔

@bender@twtxt.net It’s fun living in the future isn’t it 🤣

👋 Merry Xmas 🎄 🎅

👋 Merry (2025) Xmas y’all 🎄 Ho ho ho! 🎅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de From 2:50 PM to 3:23 PM AEST (+10 UTC) there was an outage. Everything went “up” on Down Detector, my EU region went offline, numerous sites were unavailable, and so on. Basically everything to/from the EU appeared to basically go kaput.

Hey EU friends 👋 wtf happened to the EU Internet today for about 40 minutes or so?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kiwu@twtxt.net it just so happens to be a happy coincidence that I’m extending mu’s capabilities to now include a native toolchain-free compiler (doesn’t rely on any external gcc/clang or linkers, etc) that lowers the mu source code into an intermediate representation / IR (what @movq@www.uninformativ.de refers to as “thick layers of abstractions”…) and finally to SSA + ARM64 + Mach-O encoder to produce native binary executables (at least for me on my Mac, Linux may some later?) 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Pretty sure all my mu solutions are very slow, but not so slow as I optimized most of the implementations to avoid as much brute forcing as I could.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is the total amount of cpu time consumed right?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hmmm 🧐

@kiwu@twtxt.net evening!!!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha 😆

I cleaned up all my of AoC (Advent of Code) 2025 solutions, refactored many of the utilities I had to write as reusable libraries, re-tested Day 1 (but nothing else). here it is if you’re curious! This is written in mu, my own language I built as a self-hosted minimal compiler/vm with very few types and builtins.

https://git.mills.io/prologic/aoc2025

I finished all 12 days of Advent of Code 2025! #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com — did it in my own language, mu (Go/Python-ish, dynamic, int/bool/string, no floats/bitwise). Found a VM bug, fixed it, and the self-hosted mu compiler/VM (written in mu, host in Go) carried me through. 🥳

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I shrank Day 9 Part 2 from “cover the whole map” to “only track the interesting lines.” By compressing coordinates to just the unique x/y breakpoints, the grid got tiny. I still flood-fill and do the corner-pair checks, but now on that compact grid with weighted prefix sums for instant rectangle checks. Result: far less RAM, way less CPU, same correct answer.

Day 9 also required some optimizations, if you aren’t careful, you end up with really inefficient algorithms with time/memory complexity beyond what a typical machine has 🤣

Ooops, I’ve run into a bug or limitation with mu for Day 9 🤔

Day 7 was pretty tough, I initially ended up implementing an exponential in both time and memory solution that I killed because it was eating all the resources on my Mac Studio, and this poor little machine only has 32GB of memory (I stopped it at 118GB of memory, swapping badly!), This is what I ended up doing before/after:

• Before: Time O(2^k · L), memory O(2^k), where k is the number of splitters along a reachable path and L is path length. Exponential in k.
  
• After: Time O(R·C) (or O(R·C + s) with s split events), memory O©, where R = rows, C = columns. Polynomial/linear in grid size.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Good 😊

I just completed “Printing Department” - Day 4 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/4 – Again, I’m doing this in mu, a Go(ish) / Python(ish) dynamic langugage that I had to design and build first which has very few builtins and only a handful of types (ints, no flots). 🤣

I just completed “Lobby” - Day 3 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/3 – Again, I’m doing this in mu, a Go(ish) / Python(ish) dynamic langugage that I had to design and build first which has very few builtins and only a handful of types (ints, no flots). 🤣

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Funny you should say that, I designed a new Prolog(ish) Symbolic Reasoning Engine and DSl over the holidays 🤣

Let’s see 😂

Did I mention mu only supports ints? 🤔 I’m not sure if I’ll need flots for this year’s AoC? 🤔

I’m having to write my own functions like this in mu just to solve AoC puzzles :D

fn pow10(k) {
    p := 1
    i := 0
    while i < k {
        p = p * 10
        i = i + 1
    }
    return p
}

I just completed “Gift Shop” - Day 2 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/2 – But again, I’m solving this in my own language mu that I had to build first 🤣

I just completed “Secret Entrance” - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/1 — However I did it in my own toy programming language called mu, which I had to build first 🤣

That’s the right answer! You are one gold star closer to decorating the North Pole. [Continue to Part Two]

Whoo! Making progress! With AoC 2025 solutions implemented in my own toy language 🤣

Ahh that’s because I forgot to call main() at the end of the source file. mu is a bit of a dynamic programming language, mix of Go(ish) and Python(ish).

$ ./bin/mu examples/aoc2025/day1.mu 
Execution failed: undefined variable readline

Come back from my trip, run my AoC 2025 Day 1 solution in my own language (mu) and find it didn’t run correctly 🤣 Ooops!

$ ./bin/mu examples/aoc2025/day1.mu
closure[0x140001544e0]

And I’m back from my holidays! 🥳 Back to work boo 😒

@bender@twtxt.net agreed

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com probably a bug on my end with the bridge. I’ll figure it out with your help when I get home from my holidays.