Hacker News Reader

Comment by normac2 | Hacker News Reader

Notice: this is written in fairly nicely-written C, not ASM with demoscene level micro-optimizations, like you might expect.

Goes to show how much you can get out of hardware just by writing code sensibly in a native language (and native libs/tools, of course).

View on HN

My experience in 8-bit is you can write 80% in C and then just focus and optimise the bits that need it in assembly. The rule is the same as ever, don't prematurely optimise (i.e. by writing everything in assembly), but the amount that needs optimisation is a bit bigger.

> Goes to show how much you can get out of hardware just by writing code sensibly in a native language (and native libs/tools, of course).

Personally, I find this a far less impressive demo of the SuperH SH-4 CPU than, say, Doom running on a graphical calculator. A http server (not https) simply opens sockets, writes a string, and closes the socket, a task which is usually purely I/O bound. Implement something basic like HTTPS (introduced in 1994) and watch this CPU grind to a halt.

I agree with the feeling, it's not really that impressive, but the HTTPS mention isn't accurate. Performance would be certainly lower, but remember the SH-4 was in the Dreamcast.

You can buy some niche boards[0] with SH-4, and I assure you, they can run Debian and they do SSL just fine.

[0]https://www.apnet.co.jp/product/superh/

C isn't in my mind close to the metal but potentially lets you be more sympathetic to the metal. Thanks for your drawing attention to this, I'm looking forward to reading.

Well, at the very least it's close in that it's native compiled (and not in a very abstracted way like JIT languages mostly are).

C like any other language, also has JITs and scripting implementations to chose from.

WASM, MSIL, Tendra, TIMI are all examples of JIT/AOT implementation that have C (or C++) as part of their source languages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com