Lewin Kelly Heliodex

Heliodex project update – November 2024

Sup. Hope you're all excited for this epic completely regular post about the progress of what I'm working on.

litecode

I've been steadily stabilising litecode's interpreter and continued work on the standard library. math and table libraries are now complete, and I have some functions working on the string library.

However, I'm unsure I'll be able to match the compatibility of the reference implementation, especially given that what I'm building might not even be considered Luau anymore. Most deprecated functions have been removed, math.random/randomseed have also been taken out, and the string library, the most complex so far, I'm only planning on implementing about half of.
Relating to randomness – I'd like determinism to be a priority, as this would be extremely useful for the larger project I intend for it to be a part of. Relating to the string library – A lot of the stuff relating to iterators I

Heliodex project update – December 2024

Happy new year! Small update from the end of last year here.

litecode

Litecode is, solely for the purposes of the larger project I would like to use it in, nearing completion. I ought to change the tagline to something other than "Semi-working Luau bytecode interpreter" at this point lol

I'm taking full advantage of the fact I can break compatibility with the reference implementation in a couple of places. The interpreter now features a faster, simpler, and lighter implementation of tables, at the cost of a few tiny edge cases being different with vanilla Lua/Luau. Bugs are sometimes difficult to track down because of little debugging/error handling support at the moment, though the steadily growing test suite helps a lot with this.

Heliodex project update – January 2025

Hello again! Your monthly update is here once again, with the usual side of assorted sections of rambling.

litecode

Some bug fixes and a better external API have been added, alongside four string library functions I was hesitant to implement: find, match, gmatch, and gsub. Pattern matching was, as I had suspected, a pain in the ass to get working. What next, maybe metatable support? Eh, perhaps if they actually turn out to be useful someday.

Pretty much all standard library functions apart from the really naughty ones have been implemented now, so I'll call it ready for further battle-testing as part of a larger-scale system. If any bugs crop up that I haven't caught yet, they'll probably be really insane time-sink ones.

Heliodex project update – February 2025

Spring has sprung, the grass is ris. I wonder where the monthly project update is? Welcome back all.

litecode

Litecode is in the process of being rebranded! The name "litecode" will now only be used for the VM, standard libraries, and execution system. This means that the rest of the project, what I'm coining the "communication system", will be separate, and will communicate with the litecode execution system over a(n internal) network. Litecode will handle the execution and return of programs and their results, and should cancel them if they run for too long.

The combination of the execution system, the communication system, the protocols they rely on, and the network of these systems communicating with each other is being rebranded as follows.

go-ternary

Yes, I know—yet another attempt at bringing a ternary-like experience to Go. But hey, Go doesn’t have one, and I wasn’t around when the last million were written.

Why?

Because Go doesn't have a ternary operator, and according to the official FAQ, it likely never will. The reasoning? To prevent developers from writing "impenetrably complex expressions." But let's be real—poor coding practices exist in all forms. Instead of outright banning a useful construct, wouldn’t compiler warnings for overly complicated ternary expressions have been a more reasonable approach?

Since that's not happening, here’s go-ternary—because sometimes, a one-liner is just nicer than an if-else.

Heliodex project update – March 2025

Happy holidays! The year is Marching on, so I hope everyone is doing well; here's some updates on the projects I've been working on.

Coputer

Coputer now features a number of 'program types' for programs to accept and return certain values. Current program types are as follows:

Test programs, which take no arguments and return nothing, for the purposes of debugging Litecode
Web programs, which take a few web request parameters and return a web response

Heliodex project update – April 2025

Welcome, again, to another monthly update. This one's right in the middle of my exam season! How convenient.

Mercury Core

Mercury Core is back to life now, after a few months of inactivity. The codebase has been given some much needed TLC & dedusting and I'm working on improving many of its parts – at the moment the 'communication' branch contains a rewrite of the forum, status updates, and asset comments into a single system, as well as improvements for likes/dislikes.

The database schema has also been significantly improved, the auth system has been rewritten without the need for Lucia v3 (thank you lucia!), all components have been migrated to use Svelte 5 syntax and features, fixes have been applied to the economy service, and many miscellaneous formatting and styling fixes have been made, as usual.

	<script>
	let name = 'world';

	let map = []
	let colours = []
	const petals = 13

	const hue = Math.random() * 360
	const stdev = 10

	import data1 from "./250-350.json"
	import data2 from "./350-400.json"
	import data3 from "./400-500.json"
	import data4 from "./500-550.json"

	const hits1 = data1.results[0].hits
	const hits2 = data2.results[0].hits
	const hits3 = data3.results[0].hits
	const hits4 = data4.results[0].hits

	public class MakeWeirdMips : MonoBehaviour
	{
	[MenuItem("Pema/MakeWeirdMips")]
	public static void MakeWeirdMipsAsset()
	{
	Texture2D tex = new Texture2D(1024, 1024, GraphicsFormat.R32G32B32A32_SFloat, TextureCreationFlags.MipChain);
	FillMip(tex, Color.magenta, 0); // 1024
	FillMip(tex, Color.green, 1); // 512
	FillMip(tex, Color.blue, 2); // 256
	FillMip(tex, Color.red, 3); // 128