51–60 of 102 posts
That page answers "what?" I had to browse around a bit to answer "why?" I landed here: https://100r.co/site/mission.html It's a cool idea. I found the contrast with electron helpful: > While solving some of our issues, Electron was rapidly increasing in size and hunger, so despite it being open-source soon joined the rest of the software that we did away with. Our focus shifted toward reducing our energy use, and to…
Noob 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 'VM' in "JVM" is "virtual machine".
As 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!
I feel like they are artists with computers as their medium. I've had the same question. I enjoy reading about what they do, but it isn't clear that I should ever attempt to be inspired by their work in my day to day engineering job.
I deeply respect that kind of work too, there's a place for it, but certainly it is closer to art than engineering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a savage savage critique beautifully written and demonstrated. I don’t even like small ‘simple’ systems and I’m smarting a bit reading it. Thanks for the link.
It seems a bit off target, though. It's not entirely wrong; it's true, for example, that Uxn doesn't lend itself to writing an efficient implementation easily. It's also true that the existing implementations are all on hardware that still requires a substantial amount of power, 2000 milliwatts or more, as well as being fairly inefficient in absolute terms. On the other hand, on my laptop, the Left text editor runnin…
This would work better if your example text editor wasn't an operating system. Does it use less energy than vi?
I'm no expert in Emacs stuff, but AIUI the main selling point is Emacs Lisp's decades of packages, which is both amazingly valuable and also a huge blocker on optimisation, because nobody is willing to break compatibility with all the old packages in the name of performance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a savage savage critique beautifully written and demonstrated. I don’t even like small ‘simple’ systems and I’m smarting a bit reading it. Thanks for the link.
It seems a bit off target, though. It's not entirely wrong; it's true, for example, that Uxn doesn't lend itself to writing an efficient implementation easily. It's also true that the existing implementations are all on hardware that still requires a substantial amount of power, 2000 milliwatts or more, as well as being fairly inefficient in absolute terms. On the other hand, on my laptop, the Left text editor runnin…
That said, I think he's exactly right. This ESP32 runs linux, and can run vi: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Espressif-Systems/ESP32.... Its datasheet says the power supply is 3V at 0.5amps.
It can probably run emacs, too. At least, I have, in my life run emacs on a computer less powerful than that ESP32. And, we should acknowledge emacs is not a hard target to beat :)
The main point, that tens to hundreds of thousands of man years going into optimizing compilers, combined with maybe millions of man years of silicon design and production beats a hobbyist for efficiency, I'd say he demonstrates right in the essay by handwriting assembly for uxn and comparing it with sane-to-simple C code and showing it's 100s of times faster in C than uxn.
I also take a little of his snide asides for those who know to heart; as he alludes, calling it a forth-like without the ability to compile immediate words is giving up a lot; forth is like bare metal programmability of the compiler.
Anyway, I do a lot of coding in go and (sadly) javascript, and not much in Forth, even though I like to hold the idea of the simple days of yore in my mind; we've each got our own thing. But I think he's probably right that this will always be a boutique thing which is mostly for aesthetics.
It’s somewhat disappointing that over the years the ecosystem[1] accumulated more emulators than substantial programs. [1] https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn
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I totally get your point but we are great at running old windows now with dosbox and wine.
For now, but maintaining DOSBox and especially WINE continues to require substantial engineering effort, in part because the platforms they're running on change. Implementing Uxn/Varvara is many orders of magnitude easier than implementing Win32, as evidenced by the fact that many more people have done it despite the much smaller base of applications they can then run. It seems likely that many Win32 applications wil…
But another perspective for win32 support in future metal is the bigger "community" (users, software, etc) so the increase in support complexity is compensated for much (much) larger incentives for supporting much more diverse and desired old software. WINE and related SW is a testament to this
So is the page hosted on a uxn instance too or?
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/oscean.html
Would be cool to have a web hoster that follows some of the principles layed out by uxn/100r and see what kind of service would turn out.
It’s somewhat disappointing that over the years the ecosystem[1] accumulated more emulators than substantial programs. [1] https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn
That page answers "what?" I had to browse around a bit to answer "why?" I landed here: https://100r.co/site/mission.html It's a cool idea. I found the contrast with electron helpful: > While solving some of our issues, Electron was rapidly increasing in size and hunger, so despite it being open-source soon joined the rest of the software that we did away with. Our focus shifted toward reducing our energy use, and to…