I've been working on a C++/Lua version of PicoTurtle for the last year on and off. This last week I've stretched myself to work on it and make a release. This is a full rewrite of the turtle application that I had earlier built in nodejs and electron. The previous version was slow and it was harder to add features given the tech choices I'd made.

The new version is written in C++. The turtle drawing is done on a skia surface, and the GUI is built using Qt6. Developing with Qt6 was a positive experience - espescially because of …

In the last few weeks, I've rewritten the PicoTurtle programming API in a C++ program. Here are the major features/changes of the new implementation:- * The turtle API has Lua bindings. Lua is sufficiently lightweight that the interpreter can be distributed with the new picoturtle program. * The new implementation does not have a client-server design greatly reducing its complexity from the older nodejs/electron based implementation. * The program uses Skia Canvas for the drawing implementation. Skia (developed by google) is also the canvas for google chrome. * Although bindings for other programming languages can be developed, the current version is only …

I've also added Java support to picoturtle. Here's a program to draw a rather groovy tunnel. Java code follows.

import in.abhishekmishra.picoturtle.Turtle;
import in.abhishekmishra.picoturtle.TurtleState;

public class Tunnel
{
    public static void cuboid(Turtle t, double b, double w, double h) {
        t.forward(b);

        t.right(-45);
        t.forward(h);
        t.back(h);
        t.left(-45);

        t.left(90);
        t.forward(w);

        t.left(-45);
        t.forward(h);
        t.back(h);
        t.right(-45);

        t.left(90);
        t.forward(b);

        t.left(-135);
        t.forward(h);
        t.back(h);
        t.right(-135);

        t.left(90);
        t.forward …

Recently I added C# .NET support to picoturtle. I was playing around generating waves... here's an example based on the sine function. And the C# Turtle code follows below.

using System;
using picoturtle;

namespace cspico
{
    class MainClass
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Create the turtle before using
            Turtle t = picoturtle.Turtle.CreateTurtle(args);

            if (t != null) {
                // Your code goes here

                t.penup();
                t.setx(0);
                t.sety(250);

                for(double i = 0; i < 500; i+=0.25) {
                    t.setx(i);
                    double sin = Math.Sin(i/15);
                    double y = sin * 100;
                    t.forward(y);
                    t.pendown();
                    int col = Math.Abs …

Here's a gif of PicoTurtle on MacOS drawing a fern.

TODO: fix giphy link doesn't work anymore

This week I built the first release of PicoTurtle - a turtle program built on REST/HTTP APIs, allowing programs written in potentially any programming language to draw turtle graphics with it. The desktop editor is built using electron. Download it at PicoTurtle Homepage.

I'll make follow-up posts about how the program works, but here's a dragon curve drawn using picoturtle...

And here's the code... (based on the entry on dragon curve in wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_curve#Code)

from picoturtle import *
create_turtle()

### Your code goes here ###

def dragonCurve(order, length):
    right(order * 45)
    dragonCurveRecursive(order, length, 1 …