rosettaboy VS nimkernel

As somebody who has written the same gameboy emulator in C++, Rust, and Zig (as well as C, Go, Nim, PHP, and Python) - I have yet to find a place where language affected emulation correctness.

Gameboy audio is kind of a pain in the ass (at least compared to CPU, which is fairly easy, and GPU, which is easy to get "good enough” if you don’t care about things like palette colours being swapped mid-scanline) - and some languages take more or less code to do the same thing (eg languages which allow one block of memory to be interpreted in several different ways concurrently will make the “interpret audio RAM as a bunch of registers” code much shorter with less copying) - but in my case at least, each one of my implementations actually has the same audio distortions, presumably because I’m misreading some part of the hardware spec :P

https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy/

(Also yes, the zig version is currently failing because every time I look at it the build system has had breaking changes...)

Niceness is subjective, but Nim is just as valid an addition to that group. Nim compiles to C and has had an --os=standalone mode for like 10 years from its git history, and as mentioned else-thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36506087) can be used for Linux kernel modules. Multiple people have written "stub OSes" in it (https://github.com/dom96/nimkernel & further along https://github.com/khaledh/axiom).

While it can use clang as a backend, Nim does not rely upon LLVM support like Zig or Rust (pre-gcc-rust working). Use on embedded devices is fairly popular: https://forum.nim-lang.org/search?q=embedded (or web search).

Latency-wise, for a time, video game programming was a perceived "adoption niche" or maybe "hook" for Nim and games often have stringent frame rendering deadlines. If you are interested in video games, you might appreciate https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy which covers all but Ada in your list with Nim being fastest (on one CPU/version/compiler/etc). Note, however, that cross-PL comparisons are often done by those with much "porting energy" but limited familiarity with any but a few of the PLs. A better way to view it is that "Nim responds well to optimization effort" (like C/Ada/C++/Rust/Zig).

https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy

The same gameboy emulator rewritten in C++, Go, Nim, PHP, Cython, Python, Rust, and Zig (and WIP typescript); mostly to teach myself the languages and to compare and contrast their idioms.

Also, when taken with a very large grain of salt, usable as a language benchmark (As with all benchmarks, there are lots of caveats - but as far as I’m aware this is unique in being “the same code in multiple languages” and “several thousand lines of code”):

  $ ./utils/bench.py

Looks very polished, but major disappointment that it's not showcasing OCaml as part of RosettaBoy (https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy)

I’m working on it :) https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy

(Ok it’s 5-10k lines rather than a million, but it’s non-trivial enough that the differences between languages are noticable)

> kernel developers do not allow third party runtimes in the kernel. Even meager Rust's "panic" runtime is a contentious

Much in Linux is contentious :-) which is why the module system is nice. A kernel module for C code requires no permission from Linux-core unless you need it distributed with the kernel (which, yes, might be required for "credibility" - but critically also might not). It may require many decls to access various kernel APIs, but those can be (semi-)automated or just done as-needed. So, Linux kernel policy is not so relevant (at best) which is what I meant by "no special support" (admittedly brief). Kernel coding is always a bit trickier, and you may need to build up some support code to make integration nice, though as well as decl generators.

> Can one disable runtime in Nim completely -- no GC, no exceptions?

To answer your question, and as discussed elsewhere in this subthread, Nim has many options for memory management.. only stdlib seq/string really needs automatic methods. One can disable the runtime completely via os:standalone and statically check that no exceptions are raised with Nim's effect system (and there are also both setjmp & goto based exception impls which may/may not be workable in Linux/BSD kernel module settings). As "proof more by example", a few people have written OS kernels in Nim recently[1,2] and there was another toy kernel long ago[3].

People have also written OS kernels in Go which "has a GC and runtime".[4] So, I acknowledge it's not quite the same example, but I also see no fundamental blockers for kernel modules.

[1] https://github.com/khaledh/axiom

[2] https://prosepoetrycode.potterpcs.net/2023/01/a-barebones-ke...

[3] https://github.com/dom96/nimkernel

[4] https://github.com/mit-pdos/biscuit/

Niceness is subjective, but Nim is just as valid an addition to that group. Nim compiles to C and has had an --os=standalone mode for like 10 years from its git history, and as mentioned else-thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36506087) can be used for Linux kernel modules. Multiple people have written "stub OSes" in it (https://github.com/dom96/nimkernel & further along https://github.com/khaledh/axiom).

While it can use clang as a backend, Nim does not rely upon LLVM support like Zig or Rust (pre-gcc-rust working). Use on embedded devices is fairly popular: https://forum.nim-lang.org/search?q=embedded (or web search).

Latency-wise, for a time, video game programming was a perceived "adoption niche" or maybe "hook" for Nim and games often have stringent frame rendering deadlines. If you are interested in video games, you might appreciate https://github.com/shish/rosettaboy which covers all but Ada in your list with Nim being fastest (on one CPU/version/compiler/etc). Note, however, that cross-PL comparisons are often done by those with much "porting energy" but limited familiarity with any but a few of the PLs. A better way to view it is that "Nim responds well to optimization effort" (like C/Ada/C++/Rust/Zig).