Dynamic music systems are standard in modern game development: https://www.fmod.com/studio

(Whether or not the game actually does anything interesting with them is its own question.)

Dynamic linking is returning because of ray-tracing also.

Is this a blogpost that's incomplete or a barely disguised ad?

You'd think AI would have told them not to post it

It’s hard to convince LLMs to be anything but supportive - lately I’ve been finding joy in reading its tone as patronizing.

“Exactly — that’s a very clean way to lay it out. You nailed it.”

Marcan is an injured party! If you go to great lengths to build a legally clean open-source project on top of a foundation of supposedly legally clean open-source libraries — absolutely critical libraries that have no currently existing alternative — and then discover that their supposed cleanness was a lie all along, it's not just an abstract insult and betrayal, it's a realisation that the immature actions of others have put an entire scene in legal jeopardy.

Nintendo are selective with their enforcement, and homebrew is never a particularly interesting target when they also have to contend with pirates, who (in some cases) actually are making money off it. Serious emulator and homebrew developers are however very paranoid about avoiding flagrant copyright violations because they create a vulnerability that the likes of Nintendo could choose to enforce if they ultimately piss them off too much, and also simply out of pride in doing things properly. Marcan is among the serious ones. Sadly not everyone is. It is a routine occurrence for emulator developers that they have to deal with people who think that leaked source code etc is something they should consult and pretend they didn't — exactly the kind of attitude that would send chills down the spines of legal counsel.

I want to caution also that the claims here about violating Nintendo copyrights have been known for some time, that part is not new. The open-source plagiarism is the new part and the most upsetting.

This is really interesting. Even though I'm used to reaching websites on the other side of the continent in less than a second, it's incredible seeing how fast a frequency disturbance propagates.

Objective-C is designed in such a way that, generally speaking, anything you can do with Objective-C syntax can also be done with a simple C function call to one of the Objective-C runtime functions. So you can write an entire iOS app in pure C. However, the Objective-C stuff is a lot more pleasant to use if you use the syntax for it.

As others have mentioned, for something like a simple game (rather than a normal GUI application), SDL offers a convenient wrapper that allows you to avoid touching anything Objective-C-related yourself, so you could write an entire app using only the SDL API, which is pure C. A nice bonus of that approach is that it would then work on other platforms with zero code changes.

Another source of C wrappers is Apple themselves, as iOS has a number of C interfaces like CoreFoundation that reduce how much Objective-C stuff you have to directly interact with, but there's nothing like that for UIKit, and every iOS app has to use UIKit at least a little.

On macOS there used to be Carbon, which is technically gave a C API. It could technically be used (although they stopped supplying header files) until the 32-bit deprecation. Still, I think maybe as a legacy of that a lot of Cocoa APIs do have private Core* equivalents, so if you're willing to do a lot of reverse engineering it might be possible to skip even the objc runtime.

You can build command-line apps with CoreFoundation, and you can always use Metal and QuartzCore for drawing. [1] At least there Apple does the wrapping for you.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

I’ve written a pure C Mac desktop app in 2024 that called the objective-c bindings directly. It is using a modified version of this library https://github.com/ColleagueRiley/RGFW

While I don’t think that library does iOS specifically, you can have a look at the code to see how you can call objective-c from c. Spoiler: doing so kind of sucks, and also the library code isn’t the most elegant thing I’ve seen.

toybox and the BSDs already exist for those wanting permissively licensed utilities, the GPL is not a major motivator.

They do, but they're minimal versions, not one-for-one compatible with the GNU versions.

Every proprietary Linux OS (such as most Android phones) uses busybox, at a slight disadvantage to them, because they can't handle using GPL3 coreutils. Now they'll use the MIT-licensed drop-in replacement coreutils.

It is wise to show at least a little deference to the field a term comes from. If you are not already deeply familiar with the subject matter, it is going to be hard to appreciate why particular names have caught on and why your own ideas might not be better. Immediate comprehensibility by outsiders with no prior familiarity is usually not the most important criterion.

> If you are not already deeply familiar with the subject matter, it is going to be hard to appreciate why particular names have caught on

and if you're introducing a niche term to a broader audience who might lack that context, in an asynchronous or static medium like an HN post or repo README, providing a definition that describes it in more widely used terms is a low-effort way to help unfamiliar people learn about it without forcing them to ask

Forcing people to ask or expecting them to perform a Web search for the meaningless jargon in your title is a cornerstone of HN posting.

As is complaining and "flagging" when someone calls it out.

4GiB