rosettaboy VS shumai

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)

https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/tree/master/tfjs-backend-...

([...], tflite-support, tflite-micro)

From facebookresearch/shumai (a JS tensor library) https://github.com/facebookresearch/shumai/issues/122 :

> It doesn't make sense to support anything besides WebGPU at this point. WASM + SIMD is around 15-20x slower on my machine[1]. Although WebGL is more widely supported today, it doesn't have the compute features needed for efficient modern ML (transformers etc) and will likely be a deprecated backend for other frameworks when WebGPU comes online.

tensorflow rust has a struct.Tensor:

JS for ML actually does exist https://github.com/facebookresearch/shumai

> It's really a shame that data science, ML, and notebooks are so wrapped up in it. Otherwise we could jettison the whole thing into space

Although I personally feel Python has its place, I contribute to a project that hopes to diversify the ML/scientific computing space with a TypeScript tensor lib called Shumai: https://github.com/facebookresearch/shumai

Doesn’t really matter for large batch/large model training on GPUs that don’t need much coordination.

But Python speed is one of the main motivations for a JS/TS based ML lib I’m working on: https://github.com/facebookresearch/shumai

As a hedge against CPython never becoming fast, we're creating a project called Shumai that attempts to deeply integrate with a new JavaScript runtime (Bun[3]).

You can expose objects. Here's how it is done in Bun: https://github.com/facebookresearch/shumai/blob/main/shumai/...

We've been using this feature heavily in Shumai.

I think you are vastly overestimating the complexity associated with this (user exposed ref-counting/garbage collection) and may not be totally up to date on what's implemented.

This thought is pretty much the exact motivation behind a recent effort I’m helping out with https://github.com/facebookresearch/shumai