I have a lot of stuff I want to make prototypes of that I haven’t gotten around to yet.
A compiler for a comfortable programming language. Emitting relatively naïve native code, like within a factor of 5 of native code, should be pretty easy. Ur-Scheme did it. But something with structs, iterators (maybe downward funarg blocks?) and maybe some escape analysis or something would be better. And for OO stuff, Piumarta’s tiny MOP seems like it should be able to deliver dynamic dispatch performance within a small factor of a regular function call.
A deterministic virtual machine. This is closely tied to the previous one.
Some fucking laser-cut furniture.
A video game that’s fun to play. Maybe tie in with information archival somehow.
Executable models of electromagnetic and mechanical engineering phenomena.
Some kind of live-within live programming environment, like Emacs, Smalltalk, and actually sort of Unix.
Something that does something interesting with machine vision.
An optimization system that’s applicable to laser-cut designs, using executable models of mechanical engineering phenomena.
A solar heating and dehumidifying system.
A system for drawing process flow diagrams.
A ZUI. Another one, one with text and server-side persistence.
A usable time-series database, unless someone else has written one by now.