I wrote an LLVM-powered trace-based JIT for Brainfuck
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: I wrote an LLVM-powered trace-based JIT for Brainfuck
#2I don't know... "neat hack", but it seems there is so much out there that could actually have some kind of practical application that it's a bit of a waste to work on "silly" projects. I love to hack on things that don't have any immediately evident business model or real world application, but I think purposefully working on something that never will is perhaps a bit unfortunate. Yeah, he learned something for sure, but that's pretty much all it can be.
To expand on that: if he'd written his own toy language, say, odds are it would never go anywhere, but, who knows... maybe it will find a niche. Using "brainfuck" pretty much guarantees that the code will never find a practical use.
Re: I wrote an LLVM-powered trace-based JIT for Brainfuck
#3Nice work - can you give us some data on how it is?
Re: I wrote an LLVM-powered trace-based JIT for Brainfuck
#4I don't know... "neat hack", but it seems there is so much out there that could actually have some kind of practical application that it's a bit of a waste to work on "silly" projects. I love to hack on things that don't have any immediately evident business model or real world application, but I think purposefully working on something that never will is perhaps a bit unfortunate. Yeah, he learned something for sure,…
Re: I wrote an LLVM-powered trace-based JIT for Brainfuck
#5I don't know... "neat hack", but it seems there is so much out there that could actually have some kind of practical application that it's a bit of a waste to work on "silly" projects. I love to hack on things that don't have any immediately evident business model or real world application, but I think purposefully working on something that never will is perhaps a bit unfortunate. Yeah, he learned something for sure,…
oh look! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_arts_sake
Yeah, I don't think of programming as an art, but a craft, so that's why I have the point of view I do.
There are tons of projects that will never go anywhere, done just for learning or as neat hacks, but why ensure that one won't?
Re: I wrote an LLVM-powered trace-based JIT for Brainfuck
#6I don't know... "neat hack", but it seems there is so much out there that could actually have some kind of practical application that it's a bit of a waste to work on "silly" projects. I love to hack on things that don't have any immediately evident business model or real world application, but I think purposefully working on something that never will is perhaps a bit unfortunate. Yeah, he learned something for sure,…
That's not the point. These are the kind of projects programmers do for fun. Your comments is like saying "if this guy didn't go the zoo, but rather spent his day at work, he at least might have been productive". Now, I can imagine you wouldn't enjoy watching somebody else's pictures of zoo animals, unless you were very interested in zoo animals, like, say, some people are interested in compiler technology and/or esoteric languages. Because Brainfuck is an insanely simple language to compile/interpret it's actually makes for a nice small example!
Re: I wrote an LLVM-powered trace-based JIT for Brainfuck
#7I don't know... "neat hack", but it seems there is so much out there that could actually have some kind of practical application that it's a bit of a waste to work on "silly" projects. I love to hack on things that don't have any immediately evident business model or real world application, but I think purposefully working on something that never will is perhaps a bit unfortunate. Yeah, he learned something for sure,…
That's not the point. These are the kind of projects programmers do for fun. Your comments is like saying "if this guy didn't go the zoo, but rather spent his day at work, he at least might have been productive". Now, I can imagine you wouldn't enjoy watching somebody else's pictures of zoo animals, unless you were very interested in zoo animals, like, say, some people are interested in compiler technology and/or eso…
I did a small language for fun: http://www.hecl.org
And it has actually turned out to be useful, besides being a lot of fun to work on.
I am not saying fun projects need to be useful (I'd be the last one to say that), I'm saying "why ensure they'll never be useful?".
Here's another language that is a 'fun project' that, who knows, might be quite useful some day:
http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/Reia_Programming_Language
Edit and the classic "hobby project":
> "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
Once again, by not tying a rock to his leg, it eventually went on to be just a bit more important than a hobby project.
Re: I wrote an LLVM-powered trace-based JIT for Brainfuck
#8I don't know... "neat hack", but it seems there is so much out there that could actually have some kind of practical application that it's a bit of a waste to work on "silly" projects. I love to hack on things that don't have any immediately evident business model or real world application, but I think purposefully working on something that never will is perhaps a bit unfortunate. Yeah, he learned something for sure,…
I'm assuming you've been downvoted because slightly more than 50% of HNers think of this project as an artistic/fun project.
But the fact is, even a purely artistic/fun project will have some creativity or originality in it. I would consider a toy language or Brainf__k written for the first time as artistic.
But this project is just a JIT for Brainf__k, there's no creativity in it, and all it did was give the author some experience writing JITs. In that sense this is an exercise project, and IMO exercise projects do not belong to HN.
Re: I wrote an LLVM-powered trace-based JIT for Brainfuck
#9I don't know... "neat hack", but it seems there is so much out there that could actually have some kind of practical application that it's a bit of a waste to work on "silly" projects. I love to hack on things that don't have any immediately evident business model or real world application, but I think purposefully working on something that never will is perhaps a bit unfortunate. Yeah, he learned something for sure,…
oh look! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_arts_sake
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Re: I wrote an LLVM-powered trace-based JIT for Brainfuck
#10I don't know... "neat hack", but it seems there is so much out there that could actually have some kind of practical application that it's a bit of a waste to work on "silly" projects. I love to hack on things that don't have any immediately evident business model or real world application, but I think purposefully working on something that never will is perhaps a bit unfortunate. Yeah, he learned something for sure,…
This is an awesome project to look at to learn how to write a JIT. BF is simple enough that it's easy to see what's going on.
Learning is silly and useless?