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Hey all, I love reading PG essays and watching YC content but with all the new things popping up everyday and being super occupied with running my startup, I barely get time to figure out what content to watch/essay to read next based on our startup's stage + it's difficult to keep track of what has already been consumed.

Had this thought going on for quite some time so i decided to code it quickly to fix it for myself. Sharing it here so if anyone else wants to benefit, they can do it as well!

https://www.cockroach.fyi

PS. The name comes from PG's essay on how startups should be like cockroaches, surviving even in nuclear winters

I made a post about my UI engine "CoshUI" once before that never really gained any traction, so if this does well and people need an idea on what I'm talking about, here's the previous post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48607858

Now back to topic, I've been working on a markup language for CoshUI specifically to make text easier to style. To set the stage, here's an example of how it works:

  cui.RichLabel(id="title", text="[bold color=(255, 0, 0) font_size=48]You Died![blue italic] Haha![/][/]", strikethrough=True) 

Before this update, I had a basic "Label" widget that had styling parameters and would render whatever was on the `text` field. Of course, as you can imagine, it's extremely limiting.

So I set out to create a system that fit with CoshUI's backend-agnostic-ness while also making it easy and viable to use. So I got to reworking how the text system worked.

My inspiration, Godot's RichTextLabel node, exposes BBCode. Which is the direct inspiration for "CoshML", the markup language for CoshUI's text. But one thing I didn't like about BBCode is that it only accepts one style per tag. So I looked at HTML and saw the concept of multiple calls directly in a single tag and sought to follow something similar.

When it comes to the implementation, I originally went with something like:

  [color=(255, 0, 0)]Hello[/color]

The implementation I landed on was a stack system. It would put each style into a class, and append that class to the stack, then when the parser sees "[/]" (or the universal closing tag), it'll pop that style out of the stack in a LIFO manner. Basically:

  style_stack = [TextStyle(default_values), TextStyle(text_color=(255, 0, 0), font_size=28, inherited_values_from_higher_style)]

That's basically the surface-level explanation of how the parser works. What was tough was how to render text. Because CoshUI is backend-agnostic, I needed a unified way to render text in every backend. So what I did was separate text that had different styling to something called a "TextRun".

At least at the time, the idea was to render each TextRun in the backends. They'd iterate through each run, and they'd render them. It became more complicated once I remembered text wrapping and alignment.

The solution was to make another class called "LineLayout" which holds "TextFragment" classes. TextFragments would hold all the necessary styles for that specific text, while LineLayout would hold all the TextFragments for that line. It would all be derived based on the styles in TextRun. So an example would be:

2 lines, with 2 TextRuns. The text in the first TextRun goes from 0-39 in letter position, the second is 40-81. The first line is from 0-46 in letter positions, so it will create 2 TextFragments that have the styles in run 0-39, and 40-46. Then the second line will have a TextFragment from 47-81.

So with that, backends just iterate through LineLayout and render those TextFragments.

Now, is it perfect? No, very much no. But it doesn't stop me from being proud of what it can do. I've learned a lot while making this and I'd really like some advice and feedback on the project as a whole.