Chromahack, a programming language
TL;DR: https://chromahack.rerere.org/
I've created a small programming languages I've been thinking about for a long time. I wanted a programming language that would interpret any string as a valid program and create some visual result out of that. The inspiration was the hacker movie aesthetics, typing furiously on their laptops and bright, colorful patterns flashing over screens.
Design
The language is implemented as a stack based machine. Each character is interpreted as an operation on this stack. For example, a take the top two items from the stack, adds them up and puts the result back. Unassigned symbols are simply ignored.
The stack is initiated with the x and y coordinates of a pixel in an image. (I also put a time value, which is always zero, onto the stack as I want to extend the system for animations in the future).
The program is then executed for each pixel in an [512x512] image. When the program stops (this is guaranteed through the language), the top three items of the stack are interpreted as RGB values.
Implementation
The implementation of the languages itself is rather simple, as it's only a large switch-case statement. As I wasn't sure how fast the interpreter would run when implemented JavaScript I've decided to built it in zig.
The zig program is split into a library and executable. The executable simply wraps the library by invoking the render_point function for each pixel in an image and saving the result to disk.
Usage via the command line was rather tedious. Therefore I've compiled the library to WASM to integrate it into an web app to allow for an interactive workflow.
As rendering a long program might take a few seconds I've split the rendering process into chunks to avoid blocking the UI. Randomizing the order of chunks added a nice hackeresque feel to the process.
To create the layout of the website I used Claude, as this was a part of the process I was not interested in. Everything else is organic, hand-crafted artisanal code.
Conclusion and Future
This was a fun project, which could be implemented within a few programming session. I've struggled a bit generating the WASM file. The zig documentation on this topic is rather slim and many examples are outdated. However, this was the first time I've worked with WASM and in the end it was a simple solution.
In the future I want to implement the animation feature of the language. For this I will also have to increase the performance. I want to try WebGL and SIMD for this. Another interesting topic might be to generate programs through algorithms. I think genetic algorithms could work well with this language as it can be mutated and crossed without concern for validity.
Web Version: https://chromahack.rerere.org/
Source Code: https://codeberg.org/h4kor/chromahack