Comment by entaloneralie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by entaloneralie | Hacker News Reader

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It's quite common that people think they know what working on a Pi is like, because on paper, it has all the specs of a very fast machine, but to actually use the thing as a daily driver, is another story altogether.

So, of course you can, I've written every application that now exist on Uxn, in C prior to porting them. There was a moment when I was quite convinced that C was a good candidate for what we wanted to do.

For example, equivalent programs:

C version: https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/orca-toy/tree/main/item/etc/orca....

Uxn version: https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/orca-toy/tree/main/item/src/orca....

Compiling Orca C(SDL on Pi), is about 10x~ slower, more battery hungry, (and also for some reason, very upsetting to ASAN), than building C(libdraw on Pi), which is itself about 50x slower and battery hungry than building the Uxn version.

I can compile little C cli tools on the Pi just fine, that's not the issue, building x11 or SDL applications with debug flags is another story. I much rather be assembling uxn roms in this case. I wrote a few cc65 compiled applications prior to building uxn as an alternative, but that was a non-starter on ARM.

I have tried Pi as only PC, I gave up after a short bit. Not to go too much on a tangent, my takeaway is it depends on YOUR life and work whether or not any computer will work.

If you can limit yourself within low resolution, small color pallete, direct use of simple graphics API, basicalyl target the computing experience of when computers had 50mhz CPU. Then its possible to make things blazing fast even on a Pi, using ANY language? I'm sure on a "well ackshually" level there is some difference in how the CPU executes things but practically its like milliseconds and milliamps not anything perceptable.

WIth C Im not sure if I know what im talking about here (i've compiled hello world with gcc myself, otherwise i know how to use Make even though i dont understand it but ive also never needed to understand it, but seems like every project uses makefiles or something like it...) but isn't compiling SDL or libdraw a 1 time thing the very first time you build the program, then each time you make a change to orca.c it compiles pretty quick (until 'make clean')? you dont include the time to re-compile uxn emulator when you say uxn is 50x faster? What is ASAN?

One of the reason I tend to favor Plan 9 is that it's blazing fast compared to DietPi/Raspian-like distros. It does away with most of the rounded corners, alpha, soft-looking fonts - but after a little while, I barely notice they're gone.

I haven't found that the C build systems necessarily make this faster or more pleasant, they often get in my way and make it hard to replicate my environment across devices.

It's that same idea that you just said, that "any language will do", that sent me down the path toward virtual machines, if the language doesn't matter, I might as well pick something that appeals to my aesthetics and maps well with what I'm trying to do.

If Orca was written in Lua for a framework like Love2d, for example, then I wouldn't have to recompile love2d itself, it would be more akin to how uxn works. That's usually why people use scripting languages, I think?

ASAN is an address sanitizer, if you do any c development on arm devices, you'll get pretty familiar to its countless ways of breaking in fun ways.

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