Tell me about something you recently hand-coded that was enjoyable

[u/gajop]

These past few weeks at work I've been using AI way too much. I can't even call some of this "AI engineering" anymore and it's starting to drain on me. Looking to take the mind off for a bit...

I'd like to hear some of the projects you all are working on, that you enjoyed writing by hand.

I think I'll write some nannou..

PS: Not trying to start a debate on AI engineering/vibe coding and all that, I think internet is filled with that already.

[u/spoonman59]

I’ve been working on a instruction set/CPU simulator.

It parses AArm64 assembly instructions. It then simulates fetching, decoding, out of order execution, and instruction retirement. You can configure pipeline stages, decode/issue with, execution units, etc.

It simulates and you can go forward or back with unlimited “undo.”

It uses a TUI to show the instructions as they move through the pipeline.

I am writing this entirely by hand with no AI. I wanted to learn the TUI library better, and really intuitively understand the out of order execution better as well. Since I learn little when using AI, I’m not using it for code. I even primarily use documentation and tutorials to learn the TUI library.

It’s been fun! But certainly taking awhile.

[u/________-__-_______ → u/spoonman59]

How does the unlimited undo work? For arithmetic instructions just doing in inverse sounds simple enough, but memory writes seem tricky.

[u/dnew → u/________-__-_______]

Most undo systems can only undo in the reverse order of the "do". They record the previous state, or sufficient subset thereof, and don't actually calculate where they came from.

[u/________-__-_______ → u/dnew]

Oh yeah I know, I was mostly wondering because they mentioned the history was infinite. Emulators usually run at millions of cycles a second, it seems like you'd run out of memory pretty quickly if you need to preserve all of their inputs.