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Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

You might want to add (obfuscated) to the title. The actual source code, while small, is much larger [1]. (edit: at 589 lines it's still impressive!)

For people who like this kind of thing and/or for people who want to be able to understand what is going on at all, you might like the course NAND2Tetris [2]. It's a good prerequisite to understanding this blog post if computer systems isn't a topic that one has explored before.

[1] https://gist.github.com/binji/395669d45e9005950232043ab4378a... -- the author notes this in the article.

[2] https://www.nand2tetris.org/

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Still, the unbofuscated one is only 589 lines including formatting, a copyright header, and what looks to be an 80-char line limit.

Seems sufficiently interesting either way

See, the truth is just as impressive to me, but knowing it's not a lie and a more than fair line length makes me appreciate it.

The obfuscated one is awesome though, the code is in the shape of pokeballs!

I think instead of line count, either final binary size or source code size in bytes should be more common in claims of minimalism; the demoscene, for example, always uses binary size.

I got kinda dragged about this on reddit/twitter. Afterwards I posted on r/tinycode with the size in bytes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tinycode/comments/nn5djb/pokegb_a_g...

Don’t let any of these comments take away from how great this is, _especially_ with the in-depth blog post.

would it be possible to push it down to IOCCC size? Would be fun to see it there, of course.

I think so, when I was doing the write-up I noticed a few things I could have improved (and a few bugs!)

Number of nodes in the AST or number of machine instructions might be more meaningful.

That metric is game-able, too: you just implement a VM, and only count the instructions to to VM. The rest is one big binary blob of "data", occupying a single node in the AST of the host language.

Now, of course, that's basically cooking the books, but there's a wide gulf between a full VM & smaller, domain specific ones that might not look like VMs. (All or most of data-driven programming, really.)

Final binary size including all external dependencies is probably fairest metric. With heavy use of libraries things get messy.

> including all external dependencies

The OS too?

source code size can still be manipulated by using very small identifiers or reusing them.

There should rather be a normalization metric where all identifiers are treated as eight characters long

Resulting binary will be different depending on the compiler and type of optimization and would simply be manipulated by optimizing heavily for size.

68 lines of code is pretty much arbitrary. It could have been far less, he just put it all to fit his poke ball pattern.

That, and obfuscation is also relative. You could call the 589 lines obfuscated as well.

The author's tweet claimed 62 lines.

Yep, I made a mistake it's actually 68.

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