david-given

168 ms·

1561.
by david-given 12y ago
Because the VC4 is really cool, basically.
1562.
by david-given 12y ago
Good news if you're interested in PICs and MIPS --- the PIC32 architecture has a MIPS core! And you can run RetroBSD on it: https://olimex.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/unix-on-pic32-meet-r...
1563.
by david-given 12y ago
You can replace the proprietary bootloader on the SD card. You can't replace the one in the ROM. And while running executables is easy --- just drop a VC4 binary called bootcode.bin onto the root directory of the card and the ROM loade
1564.
by david-given 12y ago
I have absolutely no idea about the processor in the Pi 2, but I got all the specs for the Pi 1 from here: https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv (It's a beautiful processor. 32 registers, built in DSP,
1565.
by david-given 12y ago
The LLVM DSL engine is really annoying to use, mainly because the pattern matching engine is pretty simple, and it's possible to express patterns in the DSL language which the pattern matching engine is unable to actually match. Until
1566.
by david-given 12y ago
Both LLVM and gcc suffer from the problem that they're vast underdocumented code bases with Internal Platform Syndrome and mostly-but-not-quite-finished internal tools which generate undebuggable code. The actual working set of knowl
1567.
by david-given 12y ago
1K Chess for the ZX81 was 672 bytes long; the ZX81 had 672 bytes free. (Although it was more complicated than that because the ZX81 'framebuffer' changed size depending on what was on the screen, so a screen that was mostly white
1568.
by david-given 12y ago
...I don't know anything about compression, but 'gipfeli' is Swiss German for 'croissant'.
1569.
by david-given 12y ago
Last I heard, radio firmware pretty much had to be locked down or the regulators wouldn't certify you; the principle here being that as all modern radio chipsets are basically software-defined radios, they're indistinguishable fro
1570.
by david-given 12y ago
Because it allows (in some situations) dynamic memory allocation where the compiler can reason about when the memory becomes unused, thus guaranteeing that it's freed. In other words, you get to use algorithms which allocate off the he
1571.
by david-given 12y ago
Io's an attempt to combine the language minimalism of Smalltalk and Lisp. So you get a message-passing object oriented language with Lisp-like features like programs being their own parse tree, which you can manipulate at will at runti
1572.
by david-given 12y ago
English is my first language, and awful is precisely the word I would use for Javascript. True, not as bad as PHP ('appalling' is appropriate there, I think), but Javascript is not a good language.
1573.
by david-given 12y ago
Don't forget 'How to broadcast Digital TV using only a VGA monitor'. http://bellard.org/dvbt/
1574.
by david-given 12y ago
LuaJIT stores non-number objects as NaN floating point values. (A NaN value has 48 bits of payload which can be set to anything.) LuaJIT uses 16 bits of that value for the type and the remaining 32 bits as payload, so pointers are limited t
1575.
by david-given 12y ago
IIRC, he's said that even if the pointer model gets extended, the garbage collector's not up to scanning more than 2GB efficiently so your programs will run like a slug. Also, it's worth remembering that the 2GB limit only ap
1576.
by david-given 14y ago
Clue 0.3 did precisely that. Unfortunately it required a patched Lua to produce the special bytecode. I decided that that was cheating --- plus it meant the Lua backend wouldn't generate code for LuaJIT. Changing it to generate tail calls w
1577.
by david-given 14y ago
Hello, author here. Clue is an experiment and probably not useful for real work --- go look at the memory model and you'll see why. (C89 allows for some really weird but standards-compliant architectures.) ints are about 56 bits wide and