PDP_11_Simulator VS pdp11.jl

I can offer you the contrary opinion: why I would not use these kind of languages.

A couple of years ago I worked on a non-trivial APL application with one of my university professors and another student. We were trying to build a CPU simulator flexible enough to handle stuff ranging from PDP-11 up to Intel x86. The goal was to run some analysis on memory accesses performed by the x86 architecture. Quite an interesting project in which I worked on for around two year.

The code is still available if you're interested: https://github.com/emlautarom1/PDP_11_Simulator

The first implementation was done in APL using a book which I don't remember as reference. We had a couple of meetings where we learned APL and the general idea behind the design. Pretty soon we started to deal with a lot of issues like:

- We only found two implementations for the APL interpreter: GNU and Dyalog. GNU is free but pretty much abandoned. Support for Windows was (is?) nonexistent. Dyalogs version is proprietary so we couldn't use that (even when a "student" version was available).

- No debugging at all. You run the code and pray for the best.

A year after we started my classmate decided to drop the project since he felt he couldn't keep up with the complexity: each line of code was non-trivial and really hard to understand.

Eventually we had to rewrite the whole project because GNUs interpreter didn't support big integers, and trying to circumvent that resulted in very poor performance. The new version was written in Julia (https://github.com/emlautarom1/Julia_Simulator), so we were able to reuse a lot of "array code". The project got cancelled in the middle of the rewrite and we kind of forgot about it.