Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere

benbridle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 69 posts

Re: Show HN: Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere

#41

Post by Lerc »

I have thought of doing a similar thing from time to time.

I had thought it could have a use in producing tiny visual apps. I am still somewhat bitter from when I found a volume control that used 3MB on a machine with 256MB total.

It seems you can change the shape of the display, which I like, although I don't really understand the documentation text

>Writing to this port group will perform an atomic write, requesting on commit that the width of the screen be locked and changed to the value written.

Locked and changed?

You also seem to be using double to refer to two bytes, is that correct? If so, I would recommend something that won't confuse people so much. Word is a common nomenclature for a 16 bit value, although it does share the space with the concept of machine words.

And of course to use it for a lot of things it would have to be able to talk to the outside world. A simplified version of what Deno does for allowing such capabilities could allow that. In the terms of Bedrock it would be easiest to have a individual device for each permission that you wanted to supply and have the host environment optionally provide them. I'd put the remote bytestream into it's own device to enable it that way.

Re: Show HN: Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere

#42

Post by apgwoz »

behrlich wrote: post #5

> I designed Bedrock to make it easier to maintain programs as a solo developer. Can you say more? I really love this idea but can’t think of any practical use case with 65k of memory. What programs are you now more easily maintaining with Bedrock? To what end?

It’s true you can’t build giant video editors or even photo editors. But, if you reestablish your expectations and think 8-bit retro, you’ll be reminded that very few things didn’t exist in some form in the 80s… just at a smaller scale. Spreadsheet? Check. Paint programs? Check. Music composition? Check.

Re: Show HN: Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere

#43

Post by jonjacky »

vincent-manis wrote: post #8

This is the latest in a very honourable tradition. My first encounter with it was with Martin Richards's BCPL system in 1972. The compiler generated a hypothetical ISA called OCODE, from which backends generated pretty good native code for Titan-2 and System/360, among others. One of those backends generated INTCODE, which was an extremely reduced ISA, for which an interpreter could be easily written (I wrote one in…

Another early example is Stoy and Strachey's virtual machine for running their OS-6 operating system on the Module One minicomputer, starting around 1969 [1,2]. It was written in BCPL. Butler Lampson wrote that it influenced the early pre-Smalltalk OS for the Xerox Alto, also in BCPL [3].

1. https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article-abstract/15/2/117/35...

2. https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article-abstract/15/3/195/48...

3. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/an-open...

Re: Show HN: Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere

#44

Post by kragen »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #26
kragen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the WebAssembly spec is over 200 pages.

Not to disagree, but WebAssembly intentionally does contain two equivalent descriptions (prose vs. mathematical) and two different formats (binary vs. text), plus a completely independent redefinition of IEEE 754 (!). The true size would be more like around 100 pages, where the instruction definitions would take about a half of them if my prediction from the table of contents is close enough. Maybe highly desugarable…

I think Bedrock's choice of not having floating point at all is a good example of the divergence in design goals.

That said, I don't see a completely independent redefinition of IEEE 754 in the 226-page https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/_download/WebAssembl.... In §4.3.3 it does restrict IEEE 754, for example requiring a particular rounding mode, and it defines NaN propagation details that the IEEE 754 spec leaves open-ended IIRC, and it does define some things redundantly to IEEE 754, such as addition and square roots and so on. But it doesn't, for example, describe the binary representation of floating-point numbers at all, even though they can be stored in linear memory and in modules (it just refers you to the IEEE spec), nor permit decimal floating point. §4.3.3 only runs from p. 74 to p. 87, so it would be hard for it to independently define all of IEEE 754.

Re: Show HN: Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere

#48

Post by ninetyninenine »

freeone3000 wrote: post #47
ninetyninenine wrote: post #45

Someone should make this for highly parallel architectures that runs over GPUs.

Lacks power. Existing solutions are SPIR-V and PTX.

I know. I mean something that's simple and has this old school flavor. Like say if GPUs were the standard in the 80s.

Re: Show HN: Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere

#49

Post by kragen »

bottom999mottob wrote: post #30
treetalker wrote: post #2

I'm not steeped in computer science, so please pardon me if the following are dumb questions. > Programs written for Bedrock can run on any computer system, so long as a Bedrock emulator has been implemented for that system. Isn't that true of any program? As long as the language that the program is written in is implemented on the system, any (valid?) program in that language will run on that system?

In theory, if a program is written in a high-level language and you have a correct implementation (interpreter, compiler, runtime) of that language on a new system, then the program should be able to run there. In practice, this is not always so straightforward, especially as you move closer to machine-level details or consider compiled binaries. Many compiled programs are built for a specific architecture (x86, ARM,…

Yes, but it might do something different there, such as print an error message and exit.
Post reply on HN