Birbla

Discussion summary

The discussion covers Nixie tubes' size and function, the implementation of a subleq machine in a programming contest, and various technical enhancements in low-level programming.

What the discussion says

  • Nixie tubes were larger than some claim, about the size of vacuum tubes.
  • A subleq machine was implemented with additional features like LLVM backend.
  • Optimizations like indirect addressing and macros are discussed for performance and creativity.
“Nixie tubes were about the size of a vacuum tube.”
— drfuchs
“The subleq machine also had a full LLVM backend and compiler.”
— wzdd

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • > Nixie tube is a tiny electrical tube with filaments in the shapes of all the digits stacked one on top of another, and it displays the desired digit by making just that filament glow

    Lol, no. That's a Numitron (although they were 7 segment)

    by RicoElectrico
  • TL;DR: the one entry implemented a subleq machine. Google it - it’s a One Instruction Set Computer (OISC). This made me smile. But it also raised a question: when were OISC’s first conceived? Would Apollo and computers of that era have benefitted from this insight?
    by russfink
  • On the subleq VM, it would run faster if they implemented Muxleq, but it woudn't win the IOCCC contest maybe. Altough in unobfuscated it's C it's just an extra short if clause with two more lines.

    On 32k roms for the GB emulator:

    https://github.com/tbsp/Adjustris

    Old build:

    https://pdroms.de/?__df=24010f101611170c163a13544b55553a4d22...

    Someone ping back the IOCCC creator, please.

    by anthk
  • I wonder at what level you could enforce/how far you could take the idea of "don't allow invalid states to be represented" to a programming language, to prevent this kind of language debauchery.

    C does seem to sit at the perfect intersection of language age and low-level access to allow this kind of competition, whereas something like Go seems far less suited for it. Javascript is routinely obfuscated pretty well for human readers. I'm not familiar enough with Rust to say, but I bet with what little I know of its syntax you could create some pretty ugly stuff?

    by Refreeze5224

Explore Birbla archives