A version of fortune built with Zig, and thus runs on Windows. Fortune is a BSD program which prints witty messages to the console.
~/fortune> fortune 100
Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in
the world that just don't add up.
- Statically linked executable with small footprint
- Takes an input an integer to print a specific fortune. No in-built randomness. For a good source of randomness, you should use Powershell's in built Get-Random.
- Fast, under 20ms to print
You will need the Zig compiler, which you can download from their website.
To create, run
zig build
This will create an executable called fortune.exe, or fortune depending on your OS. This executable has the fortunes location built in, so you can move it around as you wish. However, the autogenerated fortunes/ folder cannot be moved around.
Simply replace fortune.txt with your own file. The format of a fortune looks like this:
fortune1 CRLF
% CRLF
fortune2
The fortune.txt file is preprocessed to create a file called "fortunes-chunked.txt". This consists of fortunes which have been aligned on page boundaries. Then, we use the _lseek call to quickly load the page we want, find the fortune, and print it to the screen.