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Comment by eschaton | Hacker News Reader

The article says:

> Implementing ARM compatibility is a big-deal for normal software, and emulators are far from normal.

This is bullshit. ARM compatibility is trivial for normal software, and unless an emulator wants to leverage some sort of virtualization technology, emulators are perfectly normal software.

Stop pretending there’s some mystique to them. Everyone who’s gone through a reasonable undergraduate CS curriculum should have implemented an emulator as part of their computer architecture courses, just like everyone should have implemented an OS as part of their operating systems coursework.

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As someone who is about to graduate from an undergrad CS program in the fall, apparently my curriculum isn’t reasonable? None of the classes I’ve taken, required or otherwise, have had us implement an emulator or an entire operating system. We’ve mostly focused on integrating with existing things e.g. writing Linux kernel modules, writing MIPS assembly, rather than creating new things. Probably the only notable exception I can think of was writing a tokenizer/parser/compiler over the course of CSE340, but none of the classes my college offers involve writing an OS from scratch (at least at the undergraduate level).

Emulators are not remotely normal software. If there's any static or dynamic binary translation at all, there's a lot of architecture-specific stuff you gotta know.

That's going into the realm of virtualisation, which the parent comment does note is different from "plain old emulation".

> Everyone who’s gone through a reasonable undergraduate CS curriculum should have

Tell me the equivalent of "I went to Harvard you peasant" without telling it.

He is right on that regard. In Spain, CS curricula have that on any university.

In Spain CS undergrads are writing their own OS? Do you have any examples (preferably in English)? I find this hard to believe.

Doesn't reflect my experience at all

People who have some reasonable understanding of emulators/interpreters/compilers/OSes/etc are small % of graduates.

Over 5 years of studying I'm not aware of single person that had decent idea of how to build such a thing (with an exception for one that was really interested in one of those topics)

Maybe at top3 schools it's better, but that's very small amount of people per year.

> Everyone who’s gone through a reasonable undergraduate CS curriculum should have implemented an emulator as part of their computer architecture courses, just like everyone should have implemented an OS as part of their operating systems coursework.

You have a very ambitious understanding of the rigor of the average CS program.

Thumb mode.

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