Embed R in TIC-80 as an additional scripting language

[bryce-carson]

R is my favourite langauge, and it isn't embedded in many (if any) applications that don't focus on simply providing a front-end to R for R. This pull request is intended to fully embed R as a new scripting language in TIC-80.

I have worked on this for a couple days now.

At the moment I am working on getting GitHub Actions setup so that my fork will have its own GitHub Pages website containing the exported HTML document of the literate Org source file I'm doing my development work in. I'll also work, eventually, on getting GitHub Actions to automatically tangle the source file r.c from the Org file and check that into the repository's src/api folder.

Code review and advice on embedding is greatly appreciated, and eventually I'd love for this to become an official language and not simply exist in my experimental fork.

[bryce-carson]

https://www.r-project.org/

[bryce-carson]

It makes sense to use https://github.com/wch/r-source as a Git submodule.

[bryce-carson]

At the moment my HTML file which should be relocated to the root directory as index.html exists at src/c/TIC-80/src/api/r.html

[bryce-carson]

The literate document will help the maintainer of TIC-80 review the code, and offer guidance on its development. 🤷 I think.

[bryce-carson]

I am at the point of conducting my first informal integration tests. I was able to resolve all of my compile-time issues except the issue quoted in the last commit. I will reproduce that quotation in this comment for easier viewing.

/home/bryce/src/c/TIC-80/src/api/r.c:175:10: fatal error: ../build/assets/rdemo.tic.dat: No such file or directory
  175 | #include "../build/assets/rdemo.tic.dat"
      |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
make[2]: *** [CMakeFiles/r.dir/build.make:76: CMakeFiles/r.dir/src/api/r.c.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:283: CMakeFiles/r.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [Makefile:156: all] Error 2

[bryce-carson]

https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/tree/0e34eaaa50bfdefa546988edc0c8efa1bf280130/build/tools

I had seen these tools before, but had no idea what they were used for, and I couldn't compile the bin2txt.

/usr/bin/ld: /tmp/ccYrGMuK.o: in function `main':
bin2txt.c:(.text+0x139): undefined reference to `compress2'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

I have zlib-devel installed on Fedora, so I should have zlib.h and compress2 should be defined.

I only realized what the tools were used for after seeing this file, which given it is a BAT file won't run except on Windows. Another PR I may or may not open could address that by writing operating-system agnostic CMake scripts to identify all demo and benchmark files and run the necessary tools on them at build time, automatically (mark in place of benchmark is a bad naming convention in my opinion). That will make updating these files much easier.

[bryce-carson]

https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/tree/0e34eaaa50bfdefa546988edc0c8efa1bf280130/build/tools

I had seen these tools before, but had no idea what they were used for, and I couldn't compile the bin2txt.

/usr/bin/ld: /tmp/ccYrGMuK.o: in function `main':
bin2txt.c:(.text+0x139): undefined reference to `compress2'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

I have zlib-devel installed on Fedora, so I should have zlib.h and compress2 should be defined.

I only realized what the tools were used for after seeing this file, which given it is a BAT file won't run except on Windows. Another PR I may or may not open could address that by writing operating-system agnostic CMake scripts to identify all demo and benchmark files and run the necessary tools on them at build time, automatically (mark in place of benchmark is a bad naming convention in my opinion). That will make updating these files much easier.

Ideally, actually, none of these DAT files would be present in the repository and the required DAT files would be built at compile-time only.

[bryce-carson]

r.html.tar.gz

This compressed HTML file is the exported literate document in which I wrote my work.

This was my first real C project, I'm still learning the language after studying Narain Gehani's C: an Advanced Introduction.

I was able to sort out the DAT files, and I was able to compile and link my code into TIC-80.

The application doesn't crash on start, which is good, but anything related to R simply doesn't work. When I run new r an R cartridge isn't created, a Lua cartridge is created, and I cannot find rdemo.tic or rmark.tic when browsing the directories from within TIC-80.

I think at this point I will need some hand-holding to complete this PR, learn what I need to, and advance in my understanding of complex C software.

Regards and thanks!

[bryce-carson]

A couple of notes:

• When no languages are defined the new command will inform the user of that, but if the user tries to create a cartridge of a language not properly integrated---or not integrated at all---then TIC-80 will simply create a Lua cartridge.
• Sometimes the build will include the Lua langauge despite -DBUILD_WITH_LUA=OFF.

[bryce-carson]

@sthilaid, would you mind looking at this pull request and telling me if I've missed a number of big steps? I'm beginning to really struggle with this language integration and I'd love to hear about your experience integrating Scheme. I'll update this PR with r.c so you can look at that directly.