--target <triple> (default: the host, from OS=Windows_NT) selects the Windows
runtime. emit_win.ludic defines the POSIX names the backend already calls over
the UCRT and Win32 in IR, so rename replaces an existing file, ftell is 64-bit,
and fopen is binary. Known folders follow %APPDATA% / %LOCALAPPDATA% / %TEMP%,
and the driver speaks cmd.exe, writes .exe outputs and finds LLVM's clang.
Verified: macOS three-stage fixpoint, ludic-dev test 135/135, and on Windows
the Mac-emitted Windows IR and the Windows-built compiler's IR are identical
through two generations.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`ludic bundle` builds an AppIcon.icns and macOS reads it out of the .app, so a
shipped game has an icon. `ludic build` produces a bare executable: no bundle, no
CFBundleIconFile, and so no icon at all - macOS draws the generic green "exec"
tile. That is the build a developer runs every day, which is why "the game has no
icon" can be true for months while the bundle is perfect. It was here: the .app's
icns validated against iconutil, the plist was right, the signature was right,
and NSWorkspace rendered the artwork - and the binary beside it still had the
exec tile.
App.set_icon(path) takes the bytes through lp_pak_open, so a packed path and a
loose one both work and this does not repeat Audio.load's trick of taking a
filesystem path only. NSData copies them, so the buffer goes straight back. A
missing or undecodable image leaves the existing icon alone rather than clearing
it; a bundled app is unaffected; headless links no AppKit and compiles it away.
Verified the Cocoa sequence against an ObjC twin doing the same message sends:
before, a bare binary's applicationIconImage is the generic 128x128 tile; after,
it is the 1024x1024 artwork.
Backend change, so selfhost/ludicc.seed.ll is reseeded: the bootstrap fixpoint
and the C-free rebuild from the seed both pass.
They were the macOS layout on every platform - the comment above them even said
"macOS/BSD layout" - so a game built on Linux wrote its saves to
~/Library/Application Support, a directory that means nothing there. Naming the
right directory is the entire reason a program calls these instead of joining a
path itself.
macOS save/config ~/Library/Application Support/<app>
cache ~/Library/Caches/<app>
Linux save $XDG_DATA_HOME or ~/.local/share/<app>
config $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or ~/.config/<app>
cache $XDG_CACHE_HOME or ~/.cache/<app>
macOS is unchanged to the byte, deliberately. save_dir and config_dir stay the
same directory there: Apple's home for a config file that is not an
NSUserDefaults plist is Application Support too, and a shipped game's settings
must not move out from under it. On Linux XDG separates the two and so does this.
An XDG variable that is set but EMPTY falls back to the default, which is what
the spec says and what an exported-but-unset variable looks like from a shell.
uname is read once and remembered rather than per call, because save_dir is
called on every save.
Verified on both branches. macOS by running it; the Linux branch by building the
probe's IR with the cached platform flag pinned, which exercises the emitted XDG
code exactly - unset, set, and set-but-empty all resolve as the spec says. The
suite's own case asserts the HOST's convention, so a macOS box covers the Apple
branch and CI covers XDG.
This is a backend change, so selfhost/ludicc.seed.ll is reseeded with it: the
bootstrap fixpoint (gen2 == gen3) and the C-free rebuild from the seed both pass.
A pack root is packed wholesale, and that is the right default - a game writes
`pack "assets"` and everything it opens is in the pack. What also goes in is
everything the game does NOT open: the preview renders a model pipeline leaves
beside its meshes, the intermediate a texture bake writes and never reads again,
the .blend the .gltf came out of. Nothing errors, nothing looks wrong, and the
app is simply bigger than the game. The only way out the manifest offered was
naming every file by hand, which is worse - a list that goes stale the day
someone adds a texture.
So `.packignore`, with gitignore's rules, because that is the file everyone
already knows. Anchored and floating patterns, `preview/` for directories only,
`*` and `?` stopping at a separator where `**` crosses one, `[a-z]` classes, `!`
re-includes with the last line winning, a deeper file beating a shallower one,
and no re-including out of an ignored directory.
The semantics are not claimed, they are checked: the implementation was diffed
against git itself over two fixtures - 35 paths, 19 patterns, nested ignore
files, directory negation, `[!0-9]` and `\#` escaping - and `git check-ignore`
and `ludic pack` agree on every path.
Two rules of its own, because a pack is not a working tree. `.packignore` is
never packed (nothing reads one at run time, and --no-ignore does not bring it
back). And it governs the project's own roots only: a package's resources - the
renderer's shaders above all - are added after the gather, so a stray `*.frag`
in a game's ignore file cannot quietly un-ship what it needs to draw anything.
`ludic pack` reports what it left out; `--no-ignore` packs everything so you can
see what a rule is costing. `ludic bundle` gathers through the same path, so the
two agree by construction.
Maroon Lake keeps assets/polyhaven as a symlink into a shared checkout - which
is an ordinary thing to do, and what `ludic assets` encourages - and `find`
does not follow symlinks. The pack was written, reported success, and silently
omitted all 71 files behind the link, including the sky HDRI.
What that looked like from the outside is worth recording, because it is the
failure mode this whole feature has to avoid: the bundled game started, printed
one line about an HDRI it could not read, carried on, and then died in
terrain_height reading offset 0x1cd681c off a null pointer - the CPU height
field, never allocated, because r3d_init had given up several steps earlier. A
missing asset surfaced as a segfault a long way from the cause.
So: `find -L`, and a warning when a declared root contributes no files at all.
A root that packs nothing is nearly always a typo or a link into a tree that was
never fetched, and the warning costs one line where the alternative costs an
afternoon.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`ludic build` produces a program. Double-clicked it opens a Terminal window, it
wears the generic executable icon, it calls itself whatever the file is called,
and it carries none of its assets. `ludic bundle` produces an application.
Everything it needs is in package.ludic, so the command takes no arguments: an
Info.plist and PkgInfo from `app` lines, an .icns built by sips and iconutil at
all ten sizes macOS asks for from a single source PNG, the asset pack in
Contents/Resources, and an ad-hoc signature - which is not optional on Apple
silicon, where an unsigned binary is killed rather than warned about. The bundle
identifier falls back to the package path reversed, so a project that never
thinks about it still gets a defensible one instead of two apps sharing a key
Launch Services hangs the Dock, saved state and permissions off.
A bundled game is moved to ~/Library/Application Support/<name> before main,
because Finder starts a .app with its working directory at "/" where no save
could ever be written. Reads come out of the pack, writes land somewhere real
and per-user, and the game's save code needs no change and no platform
knowledge.
The splash is the other half of looking like an application. A game that loads
165 MB spends a visible moment doing it with nothing on screen, which from the
outside is indistinguishable from a launch that failed. splash_show puts a
borderless window up from the same constructor that mounts the pack - before
main, so it appears while the process is still starting rather than after the
slow part it exists to cover - and reads the artwork out of the pack like any
other asset. It turns the run loop enough times to be mapped and composited
there and then; once composited the backing store survives a busy main thread,
so it stays up for the whole load.
Nothing hides it automatically. Only the game knows when its first real frame is
ready, and a splash that vanishes before that leaves the same black gap it was
covering, so the game calls App.splash_hide(). Headless there is no splash and
the call lowers to nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A Ludic game opened its assets by a path relative to the working directory, so
`build/mygame` ran only from the project root and there was nothing to give
anyone but "the binary, and also this whole tree". A game is not one file, but
shipping it has to be.
`ludic pack` writes a .lpak: a header, a name-sorted entry table, a name heap
and the blobs, 16-byte aligned. Entries are stored rather than compressed - PNG,
JPEG and glTF binary arrive compressed already, and a decompressor on the load
path would spend CPU to make the file no smaller.
The reader is spliced into the compiler at the one place every asset in a Ludic
program comes through: file_open. gltf_load, tex_load, Audio.load, Fs.read_text
and the renderer's own shader loads all bottom out there, so routing it through
@lp_pak_open reaches every one of them without any of them knowing. A read of a
packed path becomes an fmemopen over the mapped bytes; everything else is the
fopen it always was. Fs.exists and Fs.size consult the packs too, so a game that
guards a load with Fs.exists keeps finding its assets once they are packed.
The pack is mmap'd rather than read: 165 MB of textures costs one syscall at
boot and pages in only what is touched. @lp_pak_boot runs from
@llvm.global_ctors, before main, so a pack is mounted before the game's first
line - and it reads packs.index, a plain list, so the mount order is explicit
and a later pack shadows an earlier one.
Without a packs.index nothing mounts and every open goes to the filesystem
exactly as before, which is every `ludic run` during development. Packing is a
shipping step and is invisible until you ship.
The compiler reproduces itself byte-exactly and the C-free bootstrap from the
seed still holds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`Gl.*` binds the whole OpenGL 4.1 core API — every entry point of the
platform gl3.h with every GL_* constant, generated by `ludic-dev glgen`
with per-call ABI thunks. Windowed builds get an NSOpenGLContext on the
existing window at Retina resolution; headless builds render into an
offscreen CGL context, so a program that uses Gl.* renders and
screenshots identically under the test harness. It links gl.ll, the
thunks and OpenGL.framework only when used; every other build stays
byte-identical.
packages/ludic.render3d is a physically based renderer written on that
surface: HDRI image-based lighting, GPU-generated terrain with scanned
PBR materials, CDLOD, cascaded shadows, glTF with skinning, instanced
vegetation with impostors, procedural grass, water, SSAO, and an HDR
pipeline with bloom, auto-exposure and ACES.
It also carries this session's work on it: the terrain at half its cost
(10.3 -> 5.4 ms of frame), the streaming hitch that got worse the longer
you played, a resize that emptied the world, and the packaging that lets
a game use the renderer from its own repository — `ludic assets`, the
material manifest shipping with the package, and shader lookup falling
back to the install root. See changes/ for each, with its numbers.
The camping game that drove all of it has moved out to its own
repository, Maroon Lake; examples/rendering/smooth.ludic stays as the
renderer's example here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`ludic new my-game` wrote `program My-Game`, so the first thing anyone did with
a new project — run it — failed with `expected '{', got '-'`. The project name
is a directory name and the identifier is Ludic source, and they do not accept
the same characters: names are now folded into a valid identifier (my-game ->
MyGame, 2048 -> Game2048, a.b.c -> ABC) and a name that cannot be a directory or
a package is refused with the rule instead of being mangled into one.
An audit of every command's flags turned up more of the same shape, all fixed:
- build/run ignored unknown options, so `--headles` silently produced a windowed
binary, and `-o` with no path was silently dropped.
- `ludic fmt` printed the formatted text to stdout while its help said "in
place", so it appeared to do nothing. It writes now, with --check for the
report-only case a hook wants.
- `ludic test nosuch.ludic` deferred the error to the compiler.
- build-lib's failure messages ran `{tmp_dir()}` through the shell literally —
an interpolation written inside a non-interpolating string — and its argument
guess matched package.lock.ludic, then tried to compile the lockfile.
- Several messages still identified the tool as `x`.
`ludic-dev test` now scaffolds under four awkward names, builds and tests each,
and asserts a space-bearing name is refused — the case that shipped broken.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`ludic help` ended with a section titled "contributing to the toolchain itself",
listing bootstrap, reseed, docs-gen and release tasks. None of that is available
to someone who installed the language — those tasks need the repository — so the
shipped tool was advertising work its user cannot do, in a namespace they have to
read past to find `new` and `run`.
The tasks move to a second program, dev.ludic -> bin/ludic-dev, built from a
checkout and excluded from every release artifact. `ludic` keeps the project and
package commands and nothing else; `ludic dev …` now explains where the tasks
went instead of failing as an unknown command.
What this shook out: the two programs share prelude/build/project/pkg, so the
helpers each had accreted in whichever file first needed them — cc(),
ensure_ludicc, the string functions, title_case, cmd_version — moved to where
both can see them. The argument-shift indirection added for the `dev` namespace
is gone with the namespace, so commands read argv directly again.
`ludic-dev test` asserts the split rather than trusting it: the staged install
must build a project, and `ludic dev build` there must fail while naming
ludic-dev. install.sh keeps building older tags, whose bootstrap goes through
main.ludic.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`ludic version` looked for bin/ludicc and VERSION relative to the working
directory. In the toolchain repo that is right by accident; from a project — the
only place a user runs it — there is no ./bin, so a perfectly good install
answered "(version unknown)". It now resolves the compiler through
ludic_home(), like every other command.
The regression test asked for the version from the repo root, so it passed for
the same accidental reason the bug hid behind; it now asks from the staged
project, where the answer can only come from the install.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Getting started meant cloning the repository, bootstrapping a compiler and
learning a task runner called `x`. That is a contributor's workflow handed to
everyone who wants to try the language.
Installing is now one command:
curl -fsSL https://workshopsoft.pages.workshopsoft.io/ludic/install.sh | sh
install.sh puts a complete toolchain — compiler, CLI, engine runtime, bundled
ludic.* packages, formatter, language server — in ~/.ludic and adds it to PATH.
Prebuilt artifacts are checksum-verified; where a platform has none, or the
release predates this layout, it bootstraps from the compiler's own IR seed with
clang. The docs site publishes the script beside the pages that quote it, so the
page and the script can never come from different releases.
`x` becomes `ludic`, and the surface splits by audience. A user of the language
sees `new`, `run`, `build`, `test`, `add`, `fmt`, `lsp`, `doctor`, `upgrade`;
`ludic new` scaffolds a project that builds and plays as it stands. Everything
the toolchain repo needs moved under `ludic dev` — build, test, reseed,
bootstrap-cfree, docs-gen, release — unchanged apart from the namespace. Those
tasks read arguments one position further along, so dispatch_dev sets a shift
and commands use arg_n()/arg_total() rather than each knowing its own depth.
Release artifacts become complete install roots (bin/ beside runtime/, packages/
and VERSION) rather than bare binaries, which is what the installer unpacks.
`ludic dev test` asserts the whole shape: it stages an install, puts it on PATH
with no LUDIC_HOME, and runs new -> build -> test through it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
