[Michal Sapka] wanted to learn a new skill, so he decided on the Commodore 64 assembly language. We didn’t say he wanted to learn a new skill that might land him a job. But we get it and even applaud it. Especially since he’s written a multi-part post about what he’s doing and how you […]
These days you can run Doom anywhere on just about anything, with things like porting Doom to JavaScript these days about as interesting as writing Snake in BASIC on one’s graphical calculator. In a twist, [Patrick Trainer] had the idea to use SQL instead of JS to do the heavy lifting of the Doom game […]
Whenever the topic is raised in popular media about porting a codebase written in an ‘antiquated’ programming language like Fortran or COBOL, very few people tend to object to this notion. After all, what could be better than ditching decades of crusty old code in a language that only your grandparents can remember as being […]
Have you ever felt the urge to make your own private binary format for use in Linux? Perhaps you have looked at creating the smallest possible binary when compiling a project, and felt disgusted with how bloated the ELF format is? If you are like [Brian Raiter], then this has led you down many rabbit […]
Incomplete JSON (such as from a log that terminates unexpectedly) doesn’t parse cleanly, which means anything that usually prints JSON nicely, won’t. Frustration with this is what led [Simon Willison] to make The Incomplete JSON pretty printer, a single-purpose web tool that pretty-prints JSON regardless of whether it’s complete or not. Making a tool to […]
Once the domain of esoteric scientific and business computing, floating point calculations are now practically everywhere. From video games to large language models and kin, it would seem that a processor without floating point capabilities is pretty much a brick at this point. Yet the truth is that integer-based approximations can be good enough to […]
Vibe coding is the buzzword of the moment. What is it? The practice of writing software by describing the problem to an AI large language model and using the code it generates. It’s not quite as simple as just letting the AI do your work for you because the developer is supposed to spend time […]
A great many PlayStation 2 games were coded in C++, and there are homebrew SDKs that let you work in C. However, precious little software for the platform was ever created in Golang. [Ricardo] decided this wouldn’t do, and set about making the language work with Sony’s best-selling console of all time. Why program a […]