Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?

https://www.bithubhq.com/

1. I made LILGUI[1], an API specification for host programs that use my LIL[2] scripting language to expose simple UI. Also includes LazLILGUI, a Lazarus[3] implementation.

2. Wrote an OpenGL binding generator [4] for Free Pascal and Lazarus that parses the official XML file. Lazarus comes with OpenGL bindings but they are ancient and i wanted to try out some new 4.6 stuff.

3. Wrote a simple audio player for X called LFPlayer [5] that uses my Little Forms [6] GUI toolkit and GStreamer as a backend. Note however that some months later i decided to create a new desktop environment and forked off Little Forms to a new (yet unpublished) toolkit that expands a bit the functionality. This is a decision that comes mainly out of frustration with the tech GNOME and KDE use which also covers basically 99% of alternative DEs since they either use GNOME or KDE/Qt tech. But that is something that i'll hopefully expand on next year (or in 2019... or whenever i get around working on it, it isn't a big priority anyway :-P).

4. I started a VB1 clone in Windows 3.1 for fun [7] although it has very dim chances of being finished. I also did a blunder with this by first starting it in DOSBox, then due to some DOSBox shortcomings i moved it to VirtualBox, left it untouched for like a month and then coming back to it - but i had forgotten that i moved to VirtualBox and continued working on it in DOSBox pretty much redoing most of the work until at some point i encountered a bug and as i solved it i thought "wait a minute, didn't i already fixed this bug?". On the bright side the new solution was better.

5. Wrote a reusable unit in Free Pascal for winged edge mesh edit operations [8]. If you have used Wings3D, you know what i am talking about. I'll use this at some in the future in my generic 3D world editor either in addition or as a replacement for brushes for world geometry [9]

6. Wrote a reusable control for 3D viewports in Lazarus [10]. Each one of those viewports is a separate instance of the control with a shared viewport renderer, viewport manager, 3D widget manager and transformation 3D widget.

7. Wrote a very simple scenegraph library in C for fun, inspired (from a functional standpoint) by the old Direct3D retained mode API and made a Python module with it using SWIG [11]. At some point i should upload this somewhere, it is neat.

8. I'm still spending most of my time working on my 3D retro top down-ish shooter [12]. No i don't use that monitor all the time, only when i need to feel that extra oldschool power (and when playing some old 2D games that simply display better on a CRT :-P).

I probably forgot some stuff, i mainly looked through my repositories [13] and images in imgur to see what i did. I think i haven't done much this year, but hopefully in 2018 i'll get around making the first versioned stable release for LIL (which will mark the day the API will remain backwards compatible for the future) and release LIL Studio [14], a simple IDE for LIL that allows remote editing of scripts (mainly useful for editing the game scripts remotely [15]) and perhaps release a preview of my desktop environment, although most of the stuff i focus on revolve around my game so the DE (and other unrelated stuff) only takes a back seat most of the time (i tend to work on it whenever i see something in /r/linux or news about current DEs that make my blood boil or something :-P). But since i use Little Forms for the launcher of the game, i'll need to have at least the forked version working since unlike Little Forms, the fork supports custom styles and i'd like to have that.

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lilgui [2] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lil [3] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [4] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/gl2unit [5] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lfplay [6] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lforms [7] https://i.imgur.com/QQOzvOU.png [8] https://i.imgur.com/4Zk9Td7.png [9] http://runtimeterror.com/rep/rtworld [10] https://i.imgur.com/0AXjCsp.gif [11] https://i.imgur.com/xu7kKu9.png [12] https://i.imgur.com/BKk3RX0.jpg [13] http://runtimeterror.com/reps.php [14] https://i.imgur.com/tCd64Wh.png [15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpKV3Sy-mYw

One highly-used tool we released this year was an S3 Bucket security scanner. We made it after reading article after article featuring companies who lost customer data because they failed to properly secure their S3 buckets.