Hacker News Reader

Performance isn't terrible, but it isn't fantastic either (70-100 MIPS native, 10-30 MIPS browser)

Those screenshots must've taken some extreme patience. Especially that Windows 10 one. 70-100 MIPS is roughly a fast 486. It sounds like this isn't even a JIT, unlike QEMU's emulation mode, and the latter is already quite noticeably slower when running modern OSs on modern hardware.

View on HN

Can't take more than a couple of hours, if booting linux to an X session only took about a day on an AVR

Forgive me if this is wrong/ignorant, but you can't really do a JIT and keep it portable, no?

Right, but it kinda depends on what you mean by "portable". Only an interpreter will work without modification on a new host arch, but code for a JIT that is organized in such a way that makes it easy to add support for new host arch might also be called "portable".

If I recall correctly, QEMU did portable JIT by implementing the instructions in C and then copying their compiled versions out of the emulator binary instead of calling them as functions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com