A catchy title for sure. A few years ago, I wrote a PostScript interpreter using the Lua language, and blend2d for graphics. The fruits of those labors ultimately turned into lj2ps. That interpreter worked fairly well, and it was my first attempt at doing some kind of language. For those who don’t know, PostScript was all the rage back in the 80s/90s, when laser printers first came on the scene. NeXT computers made it famous by supporting Dispaly PostScript for their then groundbreaking graphics display on their computers (shades of gray!!).

Well, six years later, and I’m still playing around with vector graphics, and I thought, but these days I’m doing a lot more C++ than lua development, so I thought I’d try to update the PostScript interpreter, with a twist. When I wrote the original, it was fairly focused time for about two weeks to get it running, and probably a few months to really flesh out all the quirks. I got pretty far, and for the most part could render about 90% of anything I saw in the wild. You’d be surprised what kinds of things are still done using PostScript. It’s not super difficult to migrate code from one language to the other, but lua has a certain memory management system, which I did not want to replicate, as well as an class system, which is not easy to do in C++, so I kind of wanted to start from scratch. But here’s the twist. Instead of just brute forcing it, and coming up with everything on my own, I wanted to leverage current AI tools to do it. Rather than just typing in all the code from scratch, I wanted to see how hard it is to prompt the AI tools to create the actual code for me.

Software development is a lonely quiet art where souls can easily be crushed into despair. Other hand, it’s also a place where an individual, or team, can rise to levels of triumph and creation that can feel earth changing at times.

As a largely solo developer, I find myself zeroing in on challenges that really don’t warrant the attention that I give them, but I just can’t let them go. Case in point, I’ve been playing with SVG parsing for the past couple of years because I’ve chosen this format as the best way to represent vector graphics in the apps that I develop.

My first experience with a “GPT” was copilot, integrated into Visual Studio Code. I was working inside Microsoft, and the dates seem fuzzy now, but it’s been roughly two years. What is a “GPT” anyway? Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. It says what it is right on the box. Well, at least in nerd speak. Let’s break it down though, because it’s instructive as to the state of “AI” at the moment.