[HN Gopher] A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet
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A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 174 points
Date : 2025-01-24 16:51 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wasmgroundup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wasmgroundup.com)
| marianoguerra wrote:
| post co-author here, let me know if you have any questions :)
| trescenzi wrote:
| I've used reverse Polish notation as an interview question many
| times. It works well because if someone's never seen it you can
| learn a lot about their basic understanding of algorithms. But if
| they are aware of how easy it is you can extend it forever by
| adding symbols, improving the algo they build, or doing something
| like this.
| eleumik wrote:
| You are a crazy sadic bastard
| kragen wrote:
| This is really impressive. It _is_ over 140 characters, but I
| guess "a tweet" can be any length now.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I have never used Twitter so I might be mistaken but I believe
| the limit has been 280 for a while now, which is why the first
| one at 269 bytes would also have fit.
| jsheard wrote:
| Yeah it was changed to 280 for all users in 2017. That's
| still the default limit, but paying users can exceed it now.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Twitter was based on sms, the standard SMS character limit is
| 160. They used 140 so they could use the remained 20 chars
| for other purposes.
| acuozzo wrote:
| 140 and 160 are related when it comes to SMS.
|
| The GSM-7 alphabet is the most common one in use with SMS
| (or, at least, it was as UCS-2 is more common now with
| emojis and such).
|
| 160 is the number of GSM-7 characters.
|
| 160*7/8 = 140 which is the number of bytes in the userdata
| portion of the TPDU.
| benatkin wrote:
| The username length restriction might come partly from
| that. They could surely relax it by now, though. I saw it
| at play this week when @SecondGentleman (15 characters)
| changed to @SecondGent46.
| pdubroy wrote:
| Co-author of the post here -- we had 280 characters in mind.
| :-)
| tromp wrote:
| Interesting how the obfuscated code is explained by slowly
| unobfuscating it step by step. This is the reverse of how
| obfuscated code is normally created: by starting with
| understandable code, and then slowly obfuscating it bit by bit
| (as I explained for this IOCCC submission [1]).
|
| I say normally because one could also have a superoptimizer
| search for a minimal program that achieves some desired
| behaviour, and then one has to understand it by slowly unraveling
| the generated code.
|
| [1] https://tromp.github.io/maze.html
| marianoguerra wrote:
| this one started pretty obfuscated :)
|
| https://x.com/warianoguerra/status/1576166873296941056
| martijnarts wrote:
| > if you take the time to understand what this code does, you'll
| learn a surprising amount about WebAssembly!
|
| It's a shame the article mostly teaches about codegolf tricks,
| and the actual wasm info is left to a single commented code
| block.
|
| Nonetheless an interesting article about JavaScript quirks
| though!
| hinkley wrote:
| "Fits in a tweet" can be safely assumed to mean lots and lots
| of code golf.
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(page generated 2025-01-24 23:00 UTC)