Posted by jcartw 5 days ago
Even as a pure-ttl building exercise, it trades off efficiency and usefulness in favor of understandability and fancy blinking-lights so you can see what is happening.
It is useful only for toy programs at the most.
But as a learning exercise it is absolutely first rate. 10/10 would recommend.
If you don't understand what a register is for example though, OH MAN. You'll love this!
Nope. Why does this page need to be an interactive webapp? Ideally it'd be viewable on the 8-bit computer you built from scratch too.
Also, can one do a TCP stack in 8 bits?
This isn't progressive enhancement, the page is completley unreadable without running JS. It rather irks me that someone who clearly knows about the basics of computing would do such a thing.
Also, can one do a TCP stack in 8 bits?
Yes. Lots of low-end IoT devices have an 8-bit MCU. Also, this:
Maybe there are other reasons, though? Maybe Ben wanted to learn the framework? Maybe Ben wanted to integrate a storefront and a comment section -- which he has done via Shopify and Disqus -- and his choice of framework made that easy due to the existence of official React libraries from both vendors? Maybe Ben's using cloud-native serverless deployment tools alongside his React application because some of the derivative frameworks like Next.js do really well at minifying, compressing, caching, and serving only the content that's needed?
I can understand the purist argument -- I really can, especially from a security standpoint given what we've learned in the past few years about cache-timing side-channel attacks -- but is it possible that Ben is simply a fan of learning and he's as excited about building a web application in React as he is about building an 8-bit computer from scratch?