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Over the weekend i saw an HN article about an x86 compiler written to compile using only MOV commands, after it was proven that x86 MOV is Turing Complete. I was sure this would be the most impressive waste of technology efforts i would see for a long time.

I was wrong. It lasted 3 days.

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What you call useless other people call brilliant. I was at RECon this past weekend and one of the coolest talks was about compiling malware using only MOV. Good luck reversing that.

https://recon.cx/2015/schedule/events/55.html

You still have to make system/library calls to do anything evil. You can obfuscate the logic, sure, but it's still easy to tell where important things are happening.

One day I should finish my CP/M emulator for an MSP430 microcontroller with 2kB of ram (swapping out to external storage to emulate the CP/M 64kB address space). I got it up to the point of providing a login prompt --- it'd boot in about 10-15 seconds. You could type on it via a external PC/XT keyboard (bitbanged through the GPIO pins!), but I never got the screen to work, or any proper mass storage for disk. (The 8080 architecture is surprisingly elegant and orthogonal. The Z80's a bit of a mess by comparison.)

...what? Why are you looking at me like that?

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