Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting direction to go in. I like the proliferation of toy machines that the Pico-8 has spawned.

I'm making one going in almost the polar opposite direction to this. I 8-bit avr based with asm (and C,pascal and anything else the avr ecosystem supports)

It's slow going (current work in progress in-broswer emulator+assembler at http://fingswotidun.com/avr/AvrAsm/Testbed/ ) Still have to make a website for sharing cartridge images.

Also this caught my eye in the linked article.

"TypeScript is compiled directly to machine code - there is no interpreter or JIT-compiler involved." There's a Typescript to native compiler about? Where?

View on HN

Yes, there is one, it is part of the MakeCode project.

https://makecode.com/language

"Microsoft MakeCode: from C++ to TypeScript and Blockly (and Back)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGhhV2kfJ-w

This is the github repo: https://github.com/Microsoft/pxt/tree/master/pxtcompiler

PXT's underlying programming language is a subset of TypeScript (leaving out JavaScript dynamic features).

The main features of PXT are: [...] an ARM Thumb machine code emitter

In fact there is more dynamic features in now, including accessing arbitrary fields through 'any' type and typeof expression. What's missing is mostly eval and prototype inheritance (instead we use classes). There's also a precise GC now.