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XXIIVV

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Now lie in it.

Autumn is just around the corner, and when the leaves begin to fall,
it will have been four years since the early sketches of a personal
computing system which became Uxn. I thought it would be interesting
to look back and see what has happened since.

`What problem was it supposed address?'

Uxn was designed explicitly to be a minimal bytecode target capable
of preserving a handful of our projects, and to be flexible enough to
accommodate the ones we had yet to make, in a way that would be
portable and robust against bitrot.

In regard to preservation, time will tell if it was a success, but I
can say that it has taken 3 years for the ISA to be frozen, and the
tail end of that period only saw subtle changes that did not impact
the projects made in the first two. The remaining work during that
time was primarily finding, documenting and testing against the
remaining undefined behaviors.

During these four years, I have seen countless developers
successfully implement the runtime from scratch without my help; this
is giving me hope that for as long as the documentation survives,
developers can create new emulators as the hardware platforms and
operating systems continue to evolve.

[varvara] `It is probably power hungry'

Uxn, in part, was meant to help us reconcile the power-hungry tools
we used with the energy we could harvest from the solar generated
aboard our small boat. It is commonly understood that virtual
machines are inefficient, I went ahead knowing that it might be
self-defeating to target a virtual machine in which transformations
are so granular that it would be hard for the host machine to
optimize for.

In that way, Uxn is tolerably impractical, but it is also only one
part of a larger gesture towards reducing the strain on that
resource, which requires more than just putting a virtual machine at
the center of it all; what was possible to do on paper, outside the
browser, or natively, was thereafter done that way, but a few of our
projects were still inextricably linked to portable graphical
applications.

Uxn might have helped a bit, but only so much; for instance, the
text-editor with which I am typing this article and use to do near
every computery-thing, uses dramatically less energy than what I used
previously. But I wouldn't attribute any noticeable power gain to the
application running as a rom or natively. As a target, it shines most
brightly in helping me to reduce the cost of iterating during
software development itself, say we compare the minuscule drain of
assembling a rom in comparison to rebuilding a native graphical
application or reloading a webapp.

`It doesn't solve a real problem'

I am not convinced that computers solve any real problems either.
Asking a room full of software creators "what are computers for
anyways?" will get you little beyond vague suggestions of
bureaucratic utility, which leads me to question whether bureaucracy
is solving any real problems, and so on, ad absurdum.

But if we are to put any value in preserving digital art, music,
video games and other distractions from the very real problems that
basic needs demand, it might be worthwhile to address the problem
head-on, and to encourage piracy at a massive scale, by duplicating
digital content locally, to give data a chance to survive moving
forward. Cloud platforms have all to win by making us forget that we
can utilize a specific length of bytes without their saying so, and
emulation is just one of many ways of exploring this issue.

`The problems it is trying to solve are self-inflicted'

There is a time immemorial tradition of discriminating against the
various flavors of nomadic vagabonds living in tents, cars, canal
boats -- we are not exempt from that. On discussion forums, the
economics of living on the water without a permanent address seem to
elude most people, leaving them to believe that this way of life is
something only the wealthy can do, that being in it is necessarily a
deliberate choice untied from economic realities and that we somehow
reside outside the boundary of whom deserve to be heard.

I don't think that our changing reality was what catalyzed my search
for alternatives, but it might have precipitated it. At that time,
browsers hadn't started force-feeding AI assistants, but it was
already many years into Apple devising new ways to sabotage the
repair of devices; it was becoming obvious that my choice to target
the modern web browser for my little graphical toys was a vote
against decentralized general purpose computing, and one for its
homogenization by companies that were increasingly antagonistic to
our situation.

Four years ago, had our situation been different, I don't know that I
would have decided to stay with either iOS or web development. But
even now, being more familiar with the landscape, I am not sure that
making use of pre-existing systems would have been viable solutions
for where we were trying to go.

[turnipile] `It is too complicated, or not complicated enough'

I noticed that Uxn attracts both esoteric and practical individuals.
The esoteric crowd looking at the Uxn specifications are rapid to
point at various alternatives for which very little software exists,
and the practical ones, at the limitations and ways in which it is
deficient, "the memory is too small," "the opcodes too few," "stack
machines are too slow", and so on.

  c         00:00.998458
  haskell   00:02.870586
  gforth    00:13.428614
> uxntal    00:15.861439
  lua       00:16.727872
  ruby      00:21.418707
  python    00:32.362443 tak()

Fortunately, I have seen people come around after looking back at the
typical projects that they enjoy doing, and how they can do them
comfortably with less means, but there is no denying that Uxn has a
specific scope in mind which does not accommodate all projects. That
was never really its intended purpose, it has many times over been
successful in, not acquiring users, but getting developers to explore
their own visions and finding joy there.

`Was it all worth it?'

Is it worth it to spend hundreds of hours to save what must amount to
much, much, less? It depends, if you think too much about where
you're going, you might lose respect for where you are. I have
friends who were complaining about a tool in 2020, they still are
today; their throughput would not be much improved had they spent a
years detouring to rebuild a whole tech stack. For others, who see
their ideals and tools diverge, it might be encouraging to see prior
explorations in that space; to those, I can only say that it is very
unlikely that you will see building an environment that respects your
values and idiosyncrasies as a waste of time, it might even bring you
closer to others sharing in your struggles and who might become your
friends.

Four years ago, I had doubts that it would work out, but time flies
when you're having fun!

[turnipclub]

Special thanks to Rek, Alderwick, Sigrid, Cancel, badd10de,
Bellinitte, Eirikr, Tbsp, Wim, zzo38, Kragen, Kira, Snufkin, Virgil,
SL, Sejo, gustav, soxfox, and many more.

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