serentty

I wish I could think of a good long form article about this. The best I can immediately think of is a pretty informative FAQ about Japanese encoding.

https://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/encodings.html

What I will point out though, that you can easily verify with a simple search, is that Shift-JIS can be represented losslessly in Unicode, and that this has been true for as long as Unicode CJK has existed.

The continued popularity of Shift-JIS is worth noting, but it is also important to note that its continued use is not a stable thing, and has been declining for two decades. The most popular websites in Japan no longer use it, and among smaller websites, the percentage that use it gets smaller each year. Secondly, there is absolutely no benefit to the user in terms of that can be encoded and distinguished, because it will get converted into Unicode at some stage in the pipeline anyway. Any modern text renderer used in a GUI toolkit will use Unicode internally. “Weird byte sequences to indicate Unicode characters” is really all that legacy encodings are from the perspective of new software. They are essentially just incompatible ways of specifying a subset of Unicode characters.

As for why it has held on so long, there are a few reasons. The Japanese tech world can be quite conservative and skeptical about new things. That is one factor. But I think another is that Japan was really a computing pioneer in the 1980s, and local standards ruled supreme. Compatibility was not a big concern, and even the mighty IBM PC and its clones barely made an impact there for a long time, as it was completely eclipsed by Japanese alternatives. Now, everyone is forced by our increasingly interconnected world to work on international standards, and I can’t help but feel that there is some resentment at not being about to just “do their own thing” anymore. Every time a new encoding extension is proposed, they have to present it to an organization that includes China, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, who will scrutinize it. A few years ago JIS (the Japanese standards organization) actually proposed that each East Asian country should just get their own blocks in Unicode and they should be able to encode whatever they want with no input from others. Of course, none of the other East Asian countries took their proposal seriously. I wish I could find the proposal, because I hate saying stuff like this without sources, but I can tell you that it is buried somewhere among all of the proposal documents that you can find on the website of the Ideographic Research Group, which is the organization that East Asian countries participate in which is responsible for CJK encoding in Unicode. You might find it here with enough scrolling. I have to get on the subway though, so I have to end this comment here.

https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/

The narrative that Han unification is this thing imposed by ignorant westerners on East Asian computer users is simply not true. The criteria for which characters were unified was mostly based on the criteria used in legacy East Asian encodings, which already had to deal with the question of what counts as the same character and what does not.

Unicode has round trip compatibility with the old encodings, too, without the use of any of that extra metadata, which is only used for incredibly minor character variations which are pretty much never semantically meaningful the way capitalization is. A human copyist might change one for another in copying a text by hand, just as when copying English, you do not consider it semantically meaningful whether lowercase “a” is drawn as a circle and a line, or a circle and a hook.

It doesn’t matter. If C is supposed to be a language for solving real-world problems, its strings have to be real-world strings. Wishing writing were more elegant gets you nowhere.

The inability to represent text in the vast majority of the world’s languages is a far bigger issue than the lack of emoji.

There is a lot more to Rust than just “safety”. That gets talked about a lot, but Rust is full of great features that make it worthwhile to use even when you are working in unsafe Rust.

On top of that, it should still be possible to write the application logic in safe Rust, even if you need to use unsafe for FFI with Windows stuff.

That is what happens when you have a page which is genuinely tiny even for the early days of the web, served over a modern internet connection, and it is cached so it does not have to go all the way to the server. The web could be so much faster than it is.

I actually added a link to the page to bypass CloudFlare entirely. I wanted the page to remain accessible so people could see what was on it regardless, but CloudFlare helps with that, but I also know that setting the page load slowly from the real machine is also an experience that many people are there for, so I tried to find a way to have my cake and eat it too.

Oh wow, I know you from the README! It really is something seeing you here. It is not a very impressive site at the moment but the immense amount of traffic that I have been getting is encouraging me to grow it into something with some actual content. Probably something retro related in some way.

Yeah, I find the slow loading really fun. Unfortunately, when I install the Ethernet card I imagine it will get a fair bit faster. But on the bright side, I think it will reduce the need for CloudFlare, which helps in terms of authenticity.

Do they not anymore? That’s horrible. Deliberate reduction of the internet into a platform for consumption instead of bidirectional communication.

I’m dumb enough to do it anyway. ;)

If you want to visit the page directly without CloudFlare, go to http://trombone.zapto.org instead.

Yeah, sorry about that. I am planning on finding a way to keep things interesting and authentic with the hosting, but also accessible to everyone.

In the meantime, if you want to visit the page directly without CloudFlare, go to http://trombone.zapto.org instead.

I don’t know too much about how CloudFlare works, but it looks like you got a direct connection! Congratulations! My guess is that your DNS does not have the CloudFlare entries yet.

There are 100 Mbps (Fast Ethernet) cards for the ISA bus, which in practice can apparently be around 50% faster than 10 Mbps Ethernet over such a bus. However, they seemed pretty expensive compared to the ubiquitous 3com Etherlink III that are available quite cheaply. I think Ethernet will still make a huge difference in terms of serving this site.

Yeah, I imagine it would. I can invalidate the cache myself, but it would not make sense for a user to do so.

I think the 38400 baud connection is a bigger issue than the CPU load. When I get Ethernet working I think there is a decent chance that I won’t need CloudFlare—especially if I can find a full 32-bit server that really uses the potential of the 386. Now to wait for that card to arrive in the mail. ;)

Edit: If you want to visit the page directly without CloudFlare, go to http://trombone.zapto.org instead.

This fork is handy for that. It’s fun to play with, but you need to do a decent amount yourself to get it set up.

https://github.com/mrk-its/rust-mos

If you come back tomorrow, I can probably turn CloudFlare off. Although I understand not being enthusiastic enough about my novelty website to bother.

Just fun, really. There is not much serious about it.

Yeah, maybe posting it on Hacker News was a bad idea. I should have tried somewhere with fewer visitors first.

If you had visited a few hours earlier it would have been direct. Then the hug of death hit.

If you want to visit the page directly without CloudFlare, go to http://trombone.zapto.org instead.

Please see the comments on this thread. It was directly internet facing when I posted it initially. Hacker News managed to bring it down. I had to add a cached reverse proxy. If you have any ideas about how to more authentically keep the site online, please let me know.

When I first posted it a few hours ago, I didn’t have CloudFlare. You can see lots of people unable to load the page at all in the earliest comments. Unfortunately it got to a point where pages weren’t just slow to load, but the connections were dropped entirely. So I figured that between the options of enabling CloudFlare or just having it be completely inaccessible, the former was preferable even at the cost of authenticity. I would love to find a better idea for how to keep the site online, if you have any.

It’s fun. Lots of people like doing retro game dev and the like, but often you are stuck with ancient C toolchains that suck even if you like C itself. Getting Rust working is a great way to make it more enjoyable from a hobbyist perspective, I think.

The increased speed is probably because of CloudFlare. I know it’s kind of cheating, but it was the only way to avoid the hug of death. The good news is that the 386 is still serving lots of incoming requests, just not every single one. If I can think of some more authentic way to keep the site up, I’ll try that.

I think I have CloudFlare on, and I am seeing requests with a CloudFlare header, but I am still getting a huge amount of traffic. I am not sure what the issue is. Maybe the site is so busy that CloudFlare can’t even load it to cache it, haha. Anyway, I have to leave for an exam now, so let’s hope it manages to work itself out.

Yep, I figured it was the only way to get it to keep working. Interesting that it seems to work for you already. It isn’t yet going through CloudFlare for me when I try to visit it. Maybe DNS cache?

It is indeed an SX! I am upgrading it to 16 MiB soon, as well as putting an Ethernet card in it. At that point I think it might end up a much more capable host. I am not sure if I want to find some way to keep this page up long-term yet. If there ends up being a reason to, then I will look around for some suitably retro way to host it, while still allowing me to use the 386 for other things.

I think it would have fared much better if I had waited until I got my ISA Ethernet card in the mail. But serving this over serial at 38400 baud and watching it try to keep up was tempting. I’ll have to see how well it fares with real networking hardware. At that point I might post it again, although I will have to add enough content to it to justify a repost.