This Uxn thing reminds me Inferno[1] - a VM based operating system from Bell Labs with its own programming language, GUI and networking protocol. It can run on may hardware with just 1 MB of RAM. But Inferno is far more than that, it's a Plan9's descendant. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
Uxn
31–40 of 102 posts
Re: Uxn
#32As a product designer, I don’t fully grasp everything the folks at 100r make. I’ve followed them for a couple of years. From what I can tell they have a ton focus and are serious about craftsmanship. Nothing else to add—just admire people good at making things!
Re: Uxn
#33Related. Others? Tal is the programming language for the Uxn virtual machine (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39575102 - March 2024 (18 comments) Virtualizing Uxn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37091091 - Aug 2023 (4 comments) The Uxn Ecosystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36734445 - July 2023 (54 comments) The Uxn Ecosystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36642390 - July 2023 (2…
I don't want to go to Chel-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31705239 - June 2022 (124 comments) is sorta-related, since it's a rebuttal.
Re: Uxn
#34So is the page hosted on a uxn instance too or?
Re: Uxn
#35[flagged]
Re: Uxn
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you can emulate it on a tiny piece of hardware; the smallest full Uxn/Varvara implementation I've seen so far is the GameBoy Advance, which has 384KiB of RAM. On the other hand, you've previously been able to emulate some pretty astonishing things on pretty astonishing hardware. There are a lot of minor things in Uxn and Varvara that make them hard to emulate efficiently. Extensive use of self-modifying…
LE is all i'd ask for. I bet I could get it to run on an 8008 even without that change, but LE would make it easier to emulate :) Stack-based actually helps (registers suck up RAM fast). Self-mod does not matter to emulators. It would for a JIT, but that is a separate story.
Re: Uxn
#37I really like their ideas, and I love that they follow through with actual implementation. Given the restrictions on the VM, like 64K of memory, are they going to have issues with more complex written languages like Japanese or Arabic?
Re: Uxn
#38Noob developer here. From what I understand this can only run on emulators. If I have a system powerful enough to run an emulator why would I want to use this? I understand being able to run this on old consoles. But what about modern computers?
The idea is that it's a standard and stable runtime environment. 100 years from now we'll still be able to run NES games, but running old windows programs may be nearly impossible. uxn is trying to be like the NES in that regard, but for more general use cases than just games. Write a uxn program once, and it can run anywhere, any time (on any device that can host uxn).
Re: Uxn
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
LE is all i'd ask for. I bet I could get it to run on an 8008 even without that change, but LE would make it easier to emulate :) Stack-based actually helps (registers suck up RAM fast). Self-mod does not matter to emulators. It would for a JIT, but that is a separate story.
How would you hook up 64K of RAM to an 8008? Through some shift registers?
Re: Uxn
#40Uxn is also cool, I especially liked the Orca ROM, but I couldn’t really figure it out how to make it work with MIDI, so I ended up using the Linux version.