I decided to try to write an IF engine from scratch. It's difficult

MIT license and GitHub are the obvious ways that come to my mind for how to share your framework.

I’m curious how someone exists in the state “C is the only language I know.” I suppose this described me long ago when I first started learning programming and C seemed like a good place to start (not knowing any better).

My impression is that most computer science programs force you to learn multiple languages, and self taught programmers who search “what’s the best language to do x” on Google are not going to get C as the answer. Maybe if you’re teaching yourself to program Arduino or something.

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Back in the 90’s this was a very popular endeavor, but the small size of the audience and the level of complexity prevented most people from getting close to anything workable (myself included).

And a lot of kindly responses are “but we have several already, why bother?”

In my brain, I see this has a comp sci project I’ve been trying to solve for decades. Like building your own mathematical expression evaluator.

It’s taken me that long (besides raising five kids to adulthood) to line up the things I want from an IF platform and the help of GenAI to learn some structures and to speed up some of the code writing.

In any case, a lot of people gravitate to the engine instead of writing stories and we just need to be supportive. It’s fun!

With the caveat that no one will help you or use your system unless a) you get it to a comparable state as TADS or Inform or Hugo, and b) you complete a story game within your platform that demonstrates something unique.

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Exactly, anything new in a field with competition needs a “killer project” that attracts attention to it. Though I’m also happy to have myself as the single user for most of my stuff. It still astonishes me when I get a GitHub issue or another sign that someone else tried out something I’ve written.

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Historically, several IF/text adventure systems were written in C. Davide Bucci has produced some great recent works with an old adventure system that he has converted to output to C, which he can then port to run on a huge variety of old/retro computers. See GitHub - DarwinNE/aws2c: Adventure Writing System to C translator and The Queen's Footsteps - Davide Bucci for examples.

You seem to be going for something a little more complex than an old text adventure parser/system, though.

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You certainly could implement javac and the jvm in Java.

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(considers this for more than 5 minutes)

Oh. Yeah, you’re correct.

Actually, let me redact that post. It’s pretty stupid and doesn’t really contribute much.