Zen++ Devlog VI

This was a pretty big update but I didn’t add anything that is syntaxically weird. I added functions, vectors, and strings.

What changed:

1. Functions + Returns

   • Added parsing/eval support for fn name(args){...} and return expr.
   • Added scope
   • Added built-in functions like read() and print()

2. Strings

   • Strings are defined with "string"
   • Can store/print/concatenate strings.
   • You can index into strings (s[i]) and use len(s).

3. Vectors (Dynamic Arrays)

   • Added vector syntax: [1, 2, 3].
   • Added vector indexing: v[i].
   • Added built-ins:
     • len(v)
     • push(v, x)
     • pop(v)
   • Added vector concatenation

4. Multidimensional vectors

   • Because vectors can contain vectors, nested structures like [[1,2],[3,4]] just work.
   • Nested indexing works (m[1][0]).

5. Comments + Illegal Character Throwing

   • Added support for comments like // or /* ... */
   • Added stricter behavior for unknown/invalid characters so bad input doesn’t silently pass.

6. Reorganization

   • src/ has source code
   • test/ has tests
   • build/ now contains the compiled binaries
   • docs/ contains docs/devlogs.

7. Makefile + Testing

   • Added a Makefile with nice commands
   • make run launches REPL.
   • make run <file.zpp> runs a file directly.
   • Made test.zpp as a file with every command in the language and then wrote the expected output and made make test run the test script and compare output.

Changelog

• functions and vectors
• multi line buffer

Zen++ Devlog V

Ok so in this devlog I spent a lot of time thinking about syntax and I would like some feedback about for loops.
First though, while loops were simple (not simple to implement these loops cooked me in coding but syntaxically simple), its just.

while boolean {
do this code here yeah
}

So while loops are very simple. Now for loops were a pain. I wanted them to be simple as this is meant to be super fast to write for competitive programming and the likes. So for this I took inspiration from my C++ template file.

#define FOR(i, a) for(int i = 0; i < a; i++)
#define ROF(i, a) for(int i = a; i >= 0; i--)
#define FORA(i, a, b) for(int i = a; i <= b; i++)
#define ROFA(i, a, b) for(int i = a; i >= b; i--)

That’s how I macro for loops during Codeforces contests. So instead of
for(int i=0;i<n;i++){...} I can just do FOR(i,n). Now I wanted something nice and simple for Zen++ to. So I landed on this:
A four loop has four components, the variable used, the start, the end, and the step. So why not instead of writing those as a declaration, a boolean, and an incrementation like in C++, just treat those almost as paramateres to a method. So thats what I did.
for i start end step {...}
Thats the syntax. If you want a reverse for loop you just make end bigger than start and step will be negative.
There is a 3-arg version which defaults step to 1 or -1 depending on direction and looks like: for i start end{...} and there is a 2-arg one which is: for i end{...} and defaults step to +1 and start to 0. So for codeforces you can just write for i n{...}. Very simple, but leave comments if you think its ugly. Its exclusive by default rn with no way to make it inclusive, I’ll fix that later.

Changelog

• for and while loops

Zen++ Devlog IV

I added if else statments to the code! The way an if else-if else statment will be written is like tihs:

if bool1{
    x=1
}else if bool2{
    x=2
}else{
    x=3
}

Note the lack of parantehsis, you don’t rly need them beacuse you know your condition is just gonna be sandwiched between the if and the next curly brace. Also now that I added braces I made the parser handle the braces and the AST handle blocks of code.

What changed:

1. The lexer recognizes if, else, { and }.
2. The parser builds block nodes and full if/else chains, and parses the full program instead of a single statement.
3. The evaluator now runs blocks and if/else nodes.
4. The REPL buffers lines and runs the program when you submit a blank line.

Changelog

• If / Else Statments + Blocks

Zen++ Devlog II

I added variables and assignment. You can declare a variable like x=4 and reassign it like x=5

What changed:

1. The lexer now recognizes identifiers and the = token
2. The AST supports variable nodes and assignment nodes.
3. The parser now uses a lookahead to treat identifier = expr as an assignment, and it also lets identifiers show up inside normal expressions.
4. The evaluator keeps a small variable map so assignments store values and identifiers read them back.

Changelog

• Variables and Assignment
• devlogs

I added a config menu for blocked apps. Unlike website where I could just make it a command, bliss config website add , for apps bliss needs the path to the .app, the bundle id, and the process name. Instead of forcing the user to type this out, I thought of a much better solution: all apps live in the Applications folder, so just list out all of those files and let then select which one, and that will give bliss the direct path from where it can get all the rest of the information itself. So the way I went about this first was by using fuzzy finder, fzf, and it would just start an fzf over your apps folder when you typed bliss config app add, and then when you select one it would do all the bliss things. This is nice as fzf is fast and keyboard based, but I want bliss to require as few external installs as possible, so I made a different menu if fzf is not installed, and I think that one works pretty well. I also like made the remove menu very similar but instead of on the apps folder, its on the config file. The no fzf command has a one time search feature than a numbered list which I showed off in the second screen recording.

Attachments

The first attached screen recording shows config app add and config app remove with fzf installed.
The second shows those two without fzf installed.

Packet filter

I noticed in the blocker, if you already had the tab open, for example youtube, the browser would sometimes cache the ip and thus not need to query the DNS, thus bypassing the filter. So now bliss takes the domains, gets their ips, and then stores them so those ips are blocked on a network level using a packet filter table.

CLI Cleanup

Also, I cleaned up the CLI output and added bliss status. Status now shows remaining time and whether the firewall table is active. Sometimes in the code I had left placeholder output on certain commands, I removed that and made the error messages more helpful.

Attachments

The attached screenshots show bliss –help and bliss status.

I added a real config system for websites. Instead of hardcoding YouTube, Bliss now stores domains in ~/.config/bliss/blocks.txt and the CLI supports add/remove/list. When Bliss starts, it reads this file and blocks everything inside it.
The attached screen shot shows those commands being used.

I got the first block working, this blocks websites on any browser and is independent of the browser because what it does is filter DNS requests and not give certain websites access to the internet.

I have attached three screenshots. The first shows just what happens when you run bliss start and the second shows what it does to /etc/hosts. It modifies it such that all of the websites in the config (I haven’t implemented the config so right now its hard coded to youtube) will be added to /etc/hosts and be blocked from receiving internet. The third image just shows what happens when you try to visit the tab, no internet!

Worked on a few main things:

1. First, I noticed from the last iteration that some of the parsing wasn’t that great. For example, on the lion page, and for any animal, when parsing taxonomy, it parsed most of them right from wikipedia using the scientific names like Chordata and Felidae, but for things like Animalia and Mammilia, since it was parsing a hyperlink off of wikipedia, my code defaulted to not parsing the name of the link, but the name of the page it linked to. This lead to it parsing Animalia, which linked to the page animal, as animal. I updated the parser to fix this, but I need to rerun it over night now to let the update set in.
2. Just like I before added that family detail screen, where you could click on a family card and see all the species in it and a little description of that, I added something similar to all levels of taxonomy so you could see subtaxa. For example you can see the attached video to see these new screens.
3. I identified a good model to use, SpeciesNet by Google, which is an AI image recognition model for camera traps, but works well for my case. It consists of a model that creates a bounding box around an object / animal, and then another model that identifies that animal. I created a basic fast api application to wrap this model so my app can later make a call to it requesting to identify the image it sees.

Added the ability to delete and edit bots.

I improved the visuals of the project section, moved it to its own tab, and changed the way the project cards look. They are now much wider, and horizontally laid out. They each display the title, an image, a description, and the technologies used using the same cool hover effect as they do on the home screen. I also made it so that I can quickly add new projects by just adding objects to an array in a typescript file rather than messing with the svelte files.

I added a lot to both the backend and the frontend. The backend works fully with supabase and all of the data tables are set up. There is also user authentication through email, and there should be through GitHub but thats still broken. Then after the backend as done I tested it and it worked, so I mocked up a rough frontend for creating bots, editing them and their rules and evaluations, and then for playing bots against each other. Right now its only your bots, but later I’ll add the multiplayer aspects.

Architected most of the project, got the plan done.

Frontend - Sveltekit
Backend - FastAPI

I started coding a bit of the backend like the minimax algorithm

Also I’m brainstorming security measures cuz if ppl are uploading their own code that is very dangerous.

I worked on the CTF writeup section of my project, I also wrote a demo for a chall I did a while ago. There is a cool obfuscated text animation and a system to take in markdown files and render them as html. Also made the code better.

Just started the project, got a few things working. So far we have the basic layout of the website, tabs, a section of CTF writeup that renders markdown files, a project section that hasn’t been filled in, and a sick loading animation.