Minesweeper

Minesweeper is a Go implementation of Microsoft Minesweeper using communicating sequential processes (CSP).

Each game tile is an independent, anonymous process and all communication occurs via channels. No explicit synchronization primitives are used beyond channels.

Goroutines

Minesweeper Goroutines:

• T[R,C] - Tile in row R, column C: handles cell input events and notifies neighbors
• G - The game engine: main game loop with win-loss logic
• W - The window GUI component: presents game state in
• C - The game clock: emits tick event periodically

Goroutines communicate via channels as follows:

• T[R][C] -> T[R-1][C-1], T[R-1][C], ... - Cell tells neighbors about state change
• T[R][C] -> G - Cell tells game about state change
• G -> T[R][C] - Game tells cell about user input
• G -> W - Game tells window about game state change
• W -> G - Window tells game about mouse click
• C -> G - Clock tells game about clock tick

Build

Minesweeper Go depends on go-sdl2, a Go wrapper for SDL2.

As noted in the go-sdl2 documentation, the SDL2 system library must be installed.

Docker

Docker can be used with X Window System to build and run Minesweeper without installing libraries directly.

The following command launches a bash shell in a Golang Docker container.

docker run -it --rm --name go -v "$PWD":/usr/src/golang -w /usr/src/golang golang:bookworm bash

The command below installs SDL2 and SDL2-image within the container:

apt-get install -y libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev

Configure X11 display:

export DISPLAY=host.docker.internal:0

On my system running MacOS, I did the following to establish a suitable X11 server:

• Install XQuartz (version 2.8.5) brew install xquartz
• Edit XQuartz settings to "Allow connections from network clients"
• Run command defaults write org.xquartz.X11 enable_iglx -bool true to allow OpenGL drawing
• Run XQuartz
• Run command xhost + 127.0.0.1 to ensure localhost is allowed X11 forwarding

Command Line Arguments

Include Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced command-line argument to select a difficulty.

Difficulty	Rows	Columns	Mines	Mine Density
Beginner	9	9	10	12%
Intermediate	16	16	40	16%
Advanced	16	30	99	21%

Assets

All game assets were created from scratch in Inkscape and rasterized to PNG images.