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Comment by sylware | Hacker News Reader

It's not the right move, better do it in assembly. I have a little rv64 interprer written in x86_64 assembly.

If you're going to make this argument, I'd consider arguing for Zig a little more substantiated; Rust is cross-platform and x86_64 assembly certainly isn't. Most of my day to day computing is done on ARM platforms as are some of my server resources, and I expect that to expand as time goes on.

Your use case is totally out of scope of my project.

Look down below in the comments where I do reference one written in plain and simple C from the creator of ffmpeg and q-emu.

> Your use case is totally out of scope of my project.

You have a completely different use case from the OP, but still had no problem telling them that they were doing it wrong, so it’s pretty funny to see you use this line of defense for your choice.

For a legacy ISA like arm, the less worse compromise would be to use the project from the creator of ffmpeg and q-emu would did already wrote it, but in plain and simple C, namely compiling with most, if not all, "ok" C compilers out-there...

I can’t think of a good reason to use C that isn’t also a good reason to use Zig unless you’re targeting obsolete platforms.

I think assembly is probably a pretty bad choice for a RISC-V emulator. It's not portable, a nightmare to maintain, and not even as fast as binary translation.

What kind of performance do you get?

I guess it would be a great way to learn about the differences between x86 and RISC-V though!

I am not looking for performance (it will run natively on rv64 hardware), I am looking to protect the code against computer language syntax/compiler planned obsolescence (usually cycles of 5-10 years).

Have a look a little bit below in the comments where I give a reference to another one, written by the creator of ffmpeg and q-emu.

I'm pretty sure Rust is going to outlast x86! C definitely will.

Honestly, assembly language bitrots far faster than other programming languages. In my lifetime, the only thing that really comes close to qualifying as "compiler language syntax/compiler planned obsolescence" is Python 2 to Python 3. In contrast, with x86 alone, there's three separate generations of assembly language to go through in that same timeframe.

Python still doesn't do very well on backwards compatibility & bitrot, even after 3. They're constantly deprecating and removing things.

https://docs.python.org/3.12/deprecations/index.html

This obviously improves Python, but also it means you absolutely shouldn't choose Python if you are looking for a low maintenance language.

Cycles of the planned obsolescence here is long, 5/10 years.

Shorter for c++ and similar, than C.

Look, I work on compilers, and I have no idea what you're even trying to refer with "planned obsolescence" here.

And 5/10 years is a very short time in compiler development planning! Prototypeless-functions in C were deprecated for longer than some committee members were alive before they removed from the standard, and they will remain supported in C compilers probably for longer than I myself will be alive.

feature creeps.

Real life example, in Android 7 Google re-introduced an interpreter for DEX bytecodes, manually written in Assembly, throwing away the old one that existed until Android 5, written in C.

Well, if true, those people at gogol did the right thing... if all the others could behave the same way...

If true? I usually only comment stuff I can post profs on, so is the Internet nature.

> Interpreter performance significantly improved in the Android 7.0 release with the introduction of "mterp" - an interpreter featuring a core fetch/decode/interpret mechanism written in assembly language

From https://source.android.com/docs/core/runtime/improvements

Still actually a thing on android 16, the latest?

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/art/+/c1d6b34/runt...

Yep, there are still people trying to do the right(tm) thing at gogol.

Maybe there were fired?

> It's not the right move, better do it in assembly. I have a little rv64 interprer written in x86_64 assembly.

Published your source code?

Affero GPLv3 work-in-process there, I use it for my own commands written in rv64 running on x86_64 everday (warning: it depends on a new executable file format and an ELF capsule). Currently slow-writting my own wayland compositor for AMD GPU using it. (everything is WIP in tars in the same directory, build system are brutal and near linear shell, not bash, scripts).

https://qocketgit.com/useq/sylwaqe/nyanlinux/souqce/tqee/bqa...

Replace q(s) with r.

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