[HN Gopher] Bringing Emulation into the 21st Century
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Bringing Emulation into the 21st Century
Author : rcarmo
Score : 81 points
Date : 2021-07-04 11:41 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.davetcode.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.davetcode.co.uk)
| Jeema101 wrote:
| Some of this seems slightly tongue-in-cheek, especially this
| part:
|
| "As can be seen from the screenshot above, space invaders as
| deployed onto an AKS cluster runs at ~1KHz which gives us ample
| time for debugging but does make actually playing it slightly
| difficult."
|
| Nonetheless it does still seem like an interesting technical
| exercise creating a 'distributed emulator' implemented using
| services, even if it's too slow to be of much use. :)
| crooked-v wrote:
| I've been considering a project to build a basic emulator (Game
| Boy, maybe?) entirely in Redux, with React for pixel rendering.
| I'm sure the performance will be awful, but it would be an
| interesting exercise.
| chaganated wrote:
| This satire is judging a professional-technical assault on
| civilization by the criteria of useful, self-contained tools. As
| you laugh at the spiritual abortions who wrangle kubernetes for a
| living, they laugh back, even louder, all the way to the bank.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I didn't realize that Space Invaders was so complicated.
| [deleted]
| bfrog wrote:
| Yep. Modern software in a nutshell.
| weirdkerneldev wrote:
| I know this is a joke, but the idea feels very over engineered
| and unnecessary complication.
|
| > emulation is still stuck firmly in the 20th century writing
| single threaded C++ of all things
|
| I just don't know why you treat C++ as a 20th century language.
|
| It has involved a lot and now we have C++20.
| Sanzig wrote:
| That's the joke, though: that C++ is looked down on with
| distain and treated as an obsolete language by some members of
| the younger generation of programmers.
| [deleted]
| simondotau wrote:
| Utterly brilliant. It's inspiring to see a modern microservices
| architecture approach used to such great effect. While the
| performance penalty seems somewhat steep at first blush, we know
| this problem solves itself as computers get faster. And in return
| we get a library of highly portable opcodes which can be
| efficiently re-purposed by other processor implementations.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| What interesting software could be emulated from when CPUs had
| clock rates in the 1-3 kHz range, the reasonable performance
| target for this advanced technology? According to Wikipedia,
| the ENIAC operated at about 5 kHz.
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| Agreed. This is the way of the future. Is there a subscription
| model? I'd like myself a CPU-as-a-service. $50-100 a month
| seems reasonable.
|
| Using these "efficiently repurposable" building blocks we can
| even create new software! Ultimate composability. I'll rent you
| a couple of instructions and you can create whatever turing-
| completeness your heart desires for the low, low cost of $0.01
| per instruction. (I will have to send all your data to our
| headquarters in Russia and China, but only occasionally.)
|
| Did anyone patent this already? Time to jump on this.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| For those that didn't read/skim to the end:
|
| > _Alright, if you've got this far I'm sure you've realised that
| the whole project is something of a joke._
| joezydeco wrote:
| What really would have sealed the deal was implementing this in
| WASM, translating it into Verilog, then burning it into an FPGA
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(page generated 2021-07-04 23:01 UTC)