[HN Gopher] Show HN: Transputer emulator in JavaScript (fast eno...
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Show HN: Transputer emulator in JavaScript (fast enough to be
useful)
Author : nanochess
Score : 49 points
Date : 2025-04-04 03:59 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nanochess.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (nanochess.org)
| fidotron wrote:
| It's incredible to see such an amount of Transputer work without
| seemingly mentioning either Occam or the microcode instructions
| regarding channels. The fact the Transputer was intended to be a
| high performance design is so often lost, and the development of
| the floating point units proved one of the more successful bits
| of the entire enterprise.
|
| The impressive part here isn't so much the emulator, but all the
| rest. A pascal compiler for the Transputer as a teenager in early
| 90s Mexico? That's brilliantly unlikely.
| zerealshadowban wrote:
| I have fond memories of implementing a variety of parallelized
| search algorithms with Occam for the one Transputer we had at
| the school lab. I loved it. The professors and TAs thought I
| was nuts.
| fidotron wrote:
| I too loved Occam. It was a real eye opener as to how you
| could structure things that more people should be exposed to.
| vessenes wrote:
| Ooh I love this.
|
| Seeing a DOS transpiled into JavaScript is pretty cool. Seeing a
| DOS written in the 90s by a Spanish speaking native who wanted
| everything written in Spanish is AWESOME. Being told write AYUDA
| is great. I love the sense of ownership it implies the author had
| as a teen. Just super fun.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >In the old times, Javascript was an interpreted language, but
| since many years ago it is implemented as a JIT (Just-In-Time)
| compiler, so it can approach speeds closer to the C language.
|
| Looking at many benchmarks I've seen C#, Java, Go approaching the
| speed of C, but I never have seen Javascript doing that.
|
| Perhaps is because it's dynamically typed and is harder for
| compiler and VM to optimize the generated code?
| tracker1 wrote:
| JS runtimes are probably the most advanced, powerful and
| optimized for any dynamically processed language. The amount of
| things that both can and are done with JS today is really
| impressive. Some might say horrible, how dare people do
| productive things in JS...
|
| It's also that computing capability is that much more powerful
| today than it was in the 80's and 90's. I mean, up until 2002
| or so, processing power close to doubled every other year, and
| since 2002 it slowed down a bit, but still went from 64mb ram
| in my computer around 1998 to 64gb in my computer from 6 years
| ago. Processing capability has gone up just as much. Of course
| a lot of it went into parallization this past decade and a
| half, since squeezing more out of each node/generation has been
| decreasingly fruitful.
| Retr0id wrote:
| TIL about ">>>" giving an unsigned result, very useful!
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