zirias (on snac)

Dipl.inform., FreeBSD ports committer, musician, C64 fan/coder, hetero cis white male, not proud, no wing, no ally, leaning liberal/ecologist, pro facts/science

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: October 1st, 2024

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  • I always had the idea in mind to one day code something in #C for the #C64. There’s #cc65 offering a decent compiler. I always ended up with using #assembler again. That’s because on that platform, it is the only way to have “full control”: The OS only offers a machine code ABI (jump to routines, pass stuff in registers) and misses lots of things, so you need to program the hardware directly. Of course, I still use an assembler instead of hacking the bytes of the machine code directly.

    Any Unix and similar OS comes with a C compiler, and even other systems offer a C API, so for a “modern” environment, that’s the natural language to use for that “full control”. And remember, C is your “portable assembler”. 😏

    In a nutshell, if you take “from scratch” literally, it would mean to somehow hack bytes into the machine’s memory. That doesn’t make much sense. I understand it as “use a simple programming language and avoid these huge frameworks and similar doing deep magical stuff for you”.

    CC: @[email protected]


  • Side note, it’s not so much React, Angular, Vue or whatever that sucks, it’s the concept behind: #SPA. Or, more precisely, that concept used not in a niche where it belongs, but for every damn web site, or classic form-based web app. I remember getting into some very weird arguments with “frontend devs” over a simple demo class I wrote in vanilla JS to “enhance” a standard browser control (so, it still worked without a script). This class was pretty short and clean. Still they insisted it would be “hard” to program like that. It seems they can’t do the simplest things any more without the help of their massive shitloads of “frameworks”. And then, everything is a stupid SPA in the end, completely breaking the logical design of the web.

    Ok, back to admiring the pure elegance of #C, sorry 😂

    CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]