5 ms·
If you really want to understand how things work from the very bottom, you can build a toy computer running on FPGA, there are some very cheap boards
by ido 12y ago
If you really want to understand how things work from
the very bottom, you can build a toy computer running
on FPGA, there are some very cheap boards available
now.
You don't even have to go that far, you can build something resembling the cheap early 80s/late 70s computers from off the shelf chips and 8 bit CPUs that are still sold (z80, i8051, 6502).
e.g. http://www.grappendorf.net/projects/6502-home-computer http://www.grappendorf.net/projects/6502-home-computer
These chips are simple enough that you can basically hold the whole thing in your head.
- sklogic 12y agoOf course, it's also a very useful experience. It'll just be a bit hard then to go all the way to the high level - i.e., memory-hungry, garbage-collected, with elaborate, computationally intensive compilation. For this you'd need a bit more modern device with enough memory attached. At least something around 16Mb would be nice if you want to implement a decent Lisp. With z80 you'd likely be forced to stay at around C or Basic level of abstraction.
- ido 12y agoPretty sure a 10mhz z80 with 64kb ram can handle a small forth or scheme dialect just fine (You'll have to program those interpreters in asm or c though!) :) It won't be useful/"pragmatic" but I don't think that's what we're after here anyway.
- sklogic 12y agoYes, but this way you'd need some magic - an external C compiler or at least an assembler. Instead of implementing everything from scratch, with most of the code developed on a board itself.