One year of full-time work on personal projects since leaving Google in March of 2023
I worked at Google for a bit over 12 years.
On March 17, 2023 I left Google and decided to see what I could do in a year of working full-time on my own projects.
Here is what I accomplished, in no particular order:
- Hancho
- Created Hancho, my “simple and pleasant” build system.
- One file of Python, copy-paste it into your repo and go.
- Fast parallel builds inspired by Ninja, simple syntax inspired by Bazel and Python’s f-strings.
- Powerful templating system via abuse of Python’s eval() and Javascript-style prototypal object inheritance.
- Matcheroni & Parseroni
- Created Matcheroni and Parseroni, my lexing and parsing toolkit that uses C++20 templates to generate recursive descent parsers at compile time.
- Contains a full C99 parser as an ‘example’ :D
- Also a conformant JSON parser as another example
- The generated debug symbols are horrific, but the compiled code is small and fast.
- Documentation and tutorial links are broken :/
- Metron
- Ported my C++-to-SystemVerilog translator Metron to use Matcheroni and Parseroni for parsing C++.
- Documentation has rotted a bit but the test suites still pass.
- Pinwheel
- Redesigned Pinwheel, my RISC-V microcontroller core, so that it runs 2 hardware threads (harts) at once interleaved.
- The two harts can be swapped between N ‘ready to run’ threads in a single instruction.
- Threads can read/write each other’s register files, single step each other - you can in principle have a debug interface running in one hart while the other hart is running an application (implementation TBD)
- Passes all the RV32I tests, getting it working again on a FPGA is on my to-do list (requires more work regarding block ram inference)
- PicoRVD
- Reverse engineered the debug protocol for the 10-cent ‘CH32V003’ RISC-V microcontroller.
- Wrote a GDB-compatible debug probe inteface for it that runs on the Raspberry Pi Pico
- Can flash binaries, single-step, set arbitrary numbers of breakpoints.
- Faster than the manufacturer-provided debug interface.
- The debugging code was later used by cnlohr@ to add debug support to his ch32v003fun project
- Wideboard
- Ported Wideboard to Typescript, which was a surprisingly pleasant experience and far easier than using Google’s Closure compiler.
- Wideboard is a proof-of-concept text renderer that can handle huge amounts of text at once
- Wideboard can display the entire source of the Linux kernel in a web browser tab.
- gbmicrotest
- Turned my collection of tiny Gameboy hardware tests into a standalone repo
- metronica
- Pulled out just the audio portion of my game boy emulator to make Metronica, a tool for replaying Game Boy audio dumps.
- It works but I never actually used it to play anything other than the “Link’s Awakening” title screen music. :D
- plait
- Pulled my circuit graph visualization tool Plait out into its own repo
- It has code rotted and is not very usable
- repo
- Created a meta-repo for all my projects and wrote some Python tools to manage it
- My personal projects contain a symlinks/ directory that point to other projects in the meta-repo
- This seems to be a better way than git submodules for handling inter-project dependencies, at the cost of having dependencies spread horizontally across the meta-repo directory instead of nested under a parent repo.