Demo — Conway's Game of Life

• Type: feature
• Status: done
• Owner: —
• Opened: 2026-06-19
• Closed: 2026-06-21
• Relation: demo-class candidate from idea-demo-app-candidates (top-10). Smallest of the set; exercises bit packing (cell rows) — touches feature-rtl-conversion-and-bitset-library. Cheap cross-ISA benchmark. Platonic source.

Goal

Conway's Life on a fixed grid: seed pattern, run N generations, render ASCII and print a grid hash per generation. Deterministic by construction.

Surface / shape

• grid as packed bit rows (array of machine words — manual bit packing, or the bit-set type once it lands) plus a double-buffer
• neighbor count + B3/S23 rule
• ASCII renderer + a simple grid hash (FNV / sum) per generation

Coverage

2-D arrays · bit packing · integer arithmetic · double-buffering · managed strings (render). Coverage is shallow (mostly arrays + arithmetic) — value is as a tiny deterministic oracle + per-target benchmark, not broad surface.

Acceptance / oracle

• Known patterns behave exactly: a blinker oscillates period-2, a glider translates by (1,1) every 4 generations, still-lifes stay put.
• Fixed seed + N generations → fixed grid hash, byte-identical across targets.
• Demo: examples/life/ runs a seed for N generations, prints hashes (+ optional animation frames over serial).

Constraints

Platonic source; no compiler changes; ESP32-fit (small grid). No self-host / cross regression.

Log

• 2026-06-19 — Opened in the demo-ticket organization pass.
• 2026-06-21 — Conway's Game of Life GUI demo implemented in examples/life/life.pas, using the new PCL TBitmap offscreen drawing and GTK3 Cairo backend (commit 857a675). Runs in smoke-test mode via --smoke flag, compiled and verified in make demos.