Projects

I got to work with ARMLite for a Uni unit in late 2025, during which time I was already interested in compilers and interpreters. I thought ARMLite's simple instruction set would be a good fit for making something more substantial using what I learnt from writing gml-gml (a GML interpreter).

After a few months' work, I managed to put together something that can compile a reasonably useful subset of C23, with the exception of constructs like goto due to how I implemented stack allocation.

As far as I know, this is the only C compiler that targets ARMLite, and overall I'm quite proud of this project for how long I stuck with it, and how much I learnt from it.

Thanks to the rate of progress in recent years by the team at YoYo Games, the old methods of compiling from outside of the IDE been effectively obsoleted by a proper command-line tool for managing runtimes. This tool is far from perfect, but GMEdit's popular plugin builder, which directly invoked the compiler, hasn't been able to keep up with the rate of changes.

Due to this, I took on making a replacement which uses YYG's new toolchain, and hopes to offer a lot more polish and functionality, while being a more maintainable codebase.

Constructor is a bit of an anomaly as far as GMEdit plugins go, as it does everything a bit weird - I'm personally a huge fan of being able to use modern language features, and jumped straight into the deep end by taping together an ad-hoc way to use ES modules, type definitions, among others, whilst still working within the constraints of GMEdit's now quite old structure.

In future, I'm hoping to extend support to GMRT's new toolchain, which exists separately from the current one - I believe that doing so would be set GMEdit up to "make it" into the modern age of GM which sits over the horizon, which it has so far had trouble keeping up with in the transitional period in between.

What is JNIX? Good question, hypothetical person!

JNIX, to summarise, is an abomination under construction - or rather, my attempt to create a minature subset of a *NIX-like OS under JavaScript, by using Web Workers.

Without yet having a working build, the project has gone through multiple total rewrites, and now ships with a compiler, if you could call it that - to turn ES6 modules into single runnable files in its own format - to give you an idea how bad this is.

I hope to again have time to work on it, purely for the fun of it. Making it requires learning a whole lot about how the underlying systems behind computers work, and that's fun!

If you're wondering why the site looks so generic, the answer is simple: I had a school project due very soon (i.e., two days remaining), and was way more interested in working on JNIX at the time.

Since JNIX wasn't in any usable state (and never really went anywhere in the end), I hastily put together a submission that'd tick all the necessary boxes for the assignment. An interesting aside from this is that I used a design tool (figma) to work out the layout ahead of time, whereas my previous approach had always been "just work until it looks good enough!".

In contrast, the approach of making a mock-up first ended up being a great idea, since it was now just a job of re-creating the design I already had in mind, in the actual medium - unsurprisingly, this meant the bulk of the project was done within a few hours, and from there I tinkered with some homebrew single-page application code (also new to me at the time!)

Since I've not had any direct motivation since then to make something better, and this technically works as a personal site, it hasn't changed a whole lot since then besides a deal of tinkering in the background to make it more friendly to screen readers and whatnot.