Process.spawn/poll/kill/free - non-blocking child processes with no shell: posix_spawn on
macOS (process.ll), CreateProcessW with MSVC-quoted arguments and no console window on
Windows (process_win.ll), linked only when a program uses Process.*.
Http.save_to streams a response body into a file (NSURLSession with a run-time delegate
class on macOS, the WinHTTP read loop on Windows); Http.received / Http.expected report
progress while it is pending. Freeing a pending request cancels it and parks the slot
until the worker has finished.
App.window_hide / App.window_show take the game's window off the screen and back without
closing it; the run goes on while hidden. Docs, examples, tests and a changeset.
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.
`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>
