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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

If you're actually looking for something that does build to a virtual computer, Nand2Tetris (second edition of the book The Elements of Computing Systems that goes with it is now out) is a great companion to Code: https://www.nand2tetris.org/.

Code is more high level, Nand2Tetris and Elements is project based but covers some similar territory.

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I was actually asking about The Elements of Computing Systems in my comment, not Code. What language does it use to build a virtual computer?

The hardware exercises expect you to use a simple HDL, you write an assembler in your language of choice (I used Ruby, but others have used Python or JavaScript), and you write programs for the computer you "built" in earlier chapters using Jack (a language with Java-like syntax).

I wrote mine in awk :)

You program in HDL using the Nand2Tetris software suite [1]. Super fun - I went through the book on my vacation last year. Highly recommended.

[1] https://www.nand2tetris.org/software

Quoted from the 2021 edition:

"Project 4 is written in the computer’s assembly language, and projects 9 and 12 (a simple computer game and a basic operating system) are written in Jack—the Java-like high-level language for which we build a compiler in chapters 10 and 11."

Nand2tetris uses its own version of Hardware Description Language (HDL). You will also write a compiler for it's own language called Hack.

Code is not more high level it starts from as low as you can get in terms of abstractions, it explains what electricity is and how it moves through wires and and moves on to creating simple logic gates using switches.

Highly recommend Nand2Tetris. I completed it a few months ago as a relatively non-technical person (I had only taken CS50 as my first CS class ever in 2020) and learned a ton.

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