VisUAL – A highly visual ARM emulator | Hacker News Reader

VisUAL – A highly visual ARM emulator

salmanarif.bitbucket.io

89 pointspjmlp8 comments

While this is a nice small playground, it is closed source and hasn't been updated since 2015.

Those who enjoy these emulated/simulated experiences in VisUAL's flavor may enjoy the "Cheap EMUlator: lightweight multi-architecture assembly playground" [0] it supports several variations of arm among other instruction sets(intel, mips, sparc) and to a much greater degree than VisUAL.

It is also open source, regularly updated, and also provides a visual experience, though a bit more limited than Visual's.

[0] https://github.com/hugsy/cemu

This is beautiful. I never desired to <relearn> any amount of Assembly language since my CS program, but this is making me want to try agian

> It has been designed specifically to use as a teaching tool for the Introduction to Computer Architecture course taught at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of Imperial College London.

I took this course during my time at Imperial. Tom Clarke is a great lecturer, and is actually passionate about teaching (which cannot be said about other lecturers...)

Looks really nice!

I especially love the Infinite Loop Detection!

Computer Scientists may not be able to solve the Halting Problem for a big program -- but on the smaller scale of things, an infinite (or near-infinite) loop in assembler language CAN in fact be detected!

Brilliant!

(Now if only we could solve "near-infinite loops" in our human lives -- like wasting too much of our time doing the same thing over and over again every day... like watching repetitive TV shows, or spending too much time getting coffee, or reading too much Hacker News, or what-have-you! <g>)

From the image, it looks like the loop detection is simply checking whether a line is hit <threshold> times in a row, where threshold defaults to 5000

That is, it’s the same detection you’d apply in any language/scenario, if you were interested in it.

That is exactly correct -- but prior to reading the article, I didn't think about the idea, I didn't wrap my mind around it -- until I saw the article -- sometimes a color graphic image has a way of educating the mind intuitively -- that a textbook filled with mere black and white text, mere words, does not...

It's a simple idea, to be sure...

...but sometimes the simplest ideas -- are the most elegant and powerful in their simplicity!

But yes, you are exactly correct!

Does anyone have an updated link to the "Introduction to Computer Architecture" at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of Imperial College London that VisUAL was designed for? The linked URL simply states that the site is decommissioned.

I believe there's now a VisUAL 2, soon to be open sourced: https://github.com/tomcl/visual2.github.io

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