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Writing Toy Software Is a Joy
A Joy Why you should write more toy programs2025-06-15 I am a huge fan of Richard Feyman’s famous quote: “What I cannot create, I do not understand” I think it’s brilliant, and it remains true across many fields (if you’re willing to be a little creative with the definition of ‘create’). It is to this principle that I believe I owe everything I’m truly good at.
Additional challenges include writing an in-memory filesystem, user mode and process isolation, loading ELF executables, and supporting enough video hardware to render a GUI. If you keep pushing interpreters as far as they can go without doing architecture-specific codegen (like AOT or JIT), you’ll eventually wind up (re)discovering threaded code(not to be confused with multi-threading, which is a very different beast). I built a custom ECS for my Super Mario 64 on the GBA project due to the unique performance and memory constraints of the platform, and enjoyed it a lot.
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