This week we got Gentoo installed on a Microsoft SP4 tablet!! This includes touch support so that we can make game sprites using Aseprite.
We started developing a Qt6/Pyside6-like API in Python to create in-game GUIs for Pygame. It's on Github but I've already switched away from Python (see more info from next week's post) so it probably won't get any more updates.
This week as we continued down the rabbit hole of trying to add strict typing to everything in Python, we hit some hard limits, either in Python's capabilities or in my understanding. We had previously upgraded the project to Python 3.13 (from 3.12) specifically for the default argument in typing.TypeVar(..., default=...). However, as we proceeded to use the default argument, we ran into issues with Python typing itself and with Mypy (see ticket here). Here's the code:
from typing import TypeVar, Generic
class GameNode(Generic['GameNodeType']):
pass
GameNodeType = TypeVar('GameNodeType', bound=GameNode, default=GameNode)
This short block of code is enough to insta-crash Mypy: "AssertionError: Must not defer during final iteration." We didn't dig into it any further, but it would seem that it was delaying trying to figure something out about the typing and ended up never doing it, so it gave up.
We see in this code block, our goal was to create a generic composite GameNode (which can support regular game loop behavior like update, handle input, and render), but we don't want to have to type GameNode[GameNode] or something every time we subclass it. The generic should automatically take on another GameNode so it continues to accept any GameNodes as children without having to specify the generic type every time. Maybe I'm misusing Python typing, but even so, the experience felt lacking. Next week, I'll talk about switching from Python to C++.