MATRIX RAIN: 2025 REFACTOR
21 DECEMBER 2025
The 2022 version worked but had some loose ends. Unicode support was inflexible–couldn’t mix ASCII with Katakana; Phosphor decay was stored in a separate array when it should’ve been packed with RGB; Code was harder to read than it needed to be.
Moved phosphor decay into the 4th byte of the RGB union–should’ve done this in 2022; What was I thinking.
Keeping the RGB union despite portability concerns. All my systems are little-endian and the code is cleaner this way.
Fixed Unicode by introducing a charset array. UNICODE(min, max) packs Unicode ranges into uint64: low four bytes for start, high four bytes for end. insert_code() unpacks a random block and picks a character from it:
#define UNICODE(min, max) (((uint64_t)max << 32) | min)
static uint64_t glyphs[] = {
UNICODE(0x0021, 0x007E), /* ASCII */
UNICODE(0xFF65, 0xFF9F), /* Half-width Katakana */
};
static inline void insert_code(matrix *mat,
size_t row, size_t col)
{
uint64_t blk;
uint32_t min, max;
blk = glyphs[(rand() % glyphlen)];
min = (uint32_t)blk;
max = (uint32_t)(blk >> 32);
mat->code[index(mat, row, col)] = rand() % (max - min) + min;
}
Full-width Katakana breaks column alignment. Stick to half-width (U+FF61-U+FF9F) range. Compile with -DNOKANA to disable Katakana altogether.
blend() is still good. Leaving it alone.
Tossed license and automake cruft. Just cc -O3 main.c -o matrix now. Don’t
need the ceremony.
Runs at 2-3% CPU on OpenBSD (T490). No regressions. Fans are quiet.
Commit: 69a888a