Manufactoria: A Tile-based Programming Game
on May 24th, 2010 by Tom 5 Comments Random StuffWhat is a “tile-based programming game”? That’s a very good question. I never dreamt of such a thing until I played Manufactoria today. Be warned: if you’re not a programmer you will have great difficulty with this game.
A picture is worth a thousand lines of code, so I’ll show you a screenshot from the game. The following screenshot is an implementation of a bubble sort that operates on a queue of boolean variables.
A bubble sort implemented in Manufactoria
It’s an absolutely crazy idea for a game, isn’t it? Let me give you a quick overview of it.
Why performSelector: Is More Dangerous Than I Thought
on May 14th, 2010 by Tom 6 Comments CocoaI fixed a rather nasty bug today in AspectObjectiveC. One particular unit test would crash with EXC_BAD_ACCESS every time. After learning far more about registers and ABIs than I ever wanted to know (thanks, Greg Parker), it dawned on me that performSelector: was corrupting memory. It was particularly hard to track down because the crash would happen a couple of lines after the call to performSelector:, when the corrupted memory was actually accessed.
I’ve never had a problem with performSelector: before, but this time I was using it a little differently. The return value of the selector was an NSRect.
Now for the gory explanation.
