mikepurvis 16 minutes ago

I've always really enjoyed Andrew Kelley's article about trying to statically recompile NES code from 2013 [1]. Basically he makes a ton of progress but gets hung up not just on the realities of the handwritten assembler of the era just not being all that great at mapping to higher level LLVM IR. In the conclusion he specifically calls out a JIT-type methodology as probably being the way to go, where you live-recompile the hot paths when you have the runtime data required to actually understand them, and don't worry about the parts you can't.

Very cool to see something like that in action.

[1]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html

lightedman 2 minutes ago

Still doesn't beat a natively-coded emulator. I got several that run faster on a 166MHz non-MMX Pentium than this emulator does on my Core Ultra i9.

ahartmetz 2 hours ago

Of course it beats a native interpreter. WASM overhead is about 20%, interpreter overhead is about 1000%.

What's cool here is to have a GameBoy JIT runtime at all.

  • grashalm an hour ago

    It's two jits in total.

dag100 3 hours ago

This is an incredible project for an undergraduate. Very impressive. Interesting to note that Firefox is 25% slower than Chrome/Safari, I wonder why.

  • tmpz22 3 hours ago

    [flagged]

    • simonw 2 hours ago

      I'd hire an undergraduate who can produce this level of work with Claude.

    • koolala 2 hours ago

      What are you basing this statement on? The code comments read very human to me. Your the one hurting their chances of finding a job by falsely saying this.

    • godwinson__4-8 3 hours ago

      Every company they apply to will be leveraging LLMs. Time to get over it. No need to be grumpy old man about such things. Every generation has faced such foes. The old always yields to the new.

      For the times they are a-changin'

milch 3 hours ago

Very interesting article. Would've been fun to see the comparison between native interpreter & JIT-on-WASM on iOS as well

jonny_eh an hour ago

So it's a JIT-in-JIT? JiJIT?

iberator 3 hours ago

yet on real old hardware it would be 20x slower in real life. same as all native javascript junk - its fast, but non usuable on older hardware

  • qweqwe14 an hour ago

    Here's a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer.

  • switchbak 2 hours ago

    Good thing I'm not running games on my 4gb Pentium 4 then.