Comment by pid0x17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pid0x17 | Hacker News Reader

- Nand2Tetris part 1. It is a project-oriented course from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (offered on Coursera) where you implement a whole 16-bit computer in a hardware simulator in a simplified HDL language, starting from a nand gate and ending with an ALU, RAM, CPU, program counter, and an assembler for the computer's assembly language. I only have two modules left before I finish part 1. In part 2 (which I did not start with yet), you implement a VM, OS, compiler and high-level language and more stuff.

- I am implementing my own MCP server in Go for Bitbucket. This is more of a learning project for me (I was curious about MCP servers), but I also didn't find any MCP servers that have a clean codebase. Many seem to be vibe-coded, and as I work at a company where security is really important, I thought I would implement my own. (Still a WIP: https://github.com/pid0x17/mcp-bitbucket). I haven't touched this project in a while, though, as I am focusing on Nand2Tetris.

- I am reading the Rust Programming Language book, but I am still in the beginning (just finished Chapter 3 on the weekend).

Nand2Tetris is great. Definitely one of, if not the, most impactful bit of education I’ve ever done it terms of knowledge imparted.

I am absolutely loving it!

I was very intimidated at first because the concept sounds very difficult, but Prof. Schocken and Prof. Nisan are amazing at breaking down the concepts and abstractions and making something complex very easy to follow and understand.

I did Nand2Tetris during the last Christmas holidays. I only finished the first part - I got it working on Verilog - so I basically have a emulated computer that can run programs in assembly language. Will need to do part 2 as well.

https://github.com/rishi93/nand2tetris

That's a really cool idea!!

I was actually wondering: are we allowed to publish our work on GitHub? I already have a Github repo but I made it private and only show it to potential employers and individual people who are interested, because I am not very certain about the copyright rules of the HDL skeleton files, and whether we are allowed to publish our work, given Coursera's honor code.

So funny you've gone through both Nand2Tetris AND are going through TRPL book. I'm just a few months ahead of you on both!

I also implemented Nand2Tetris part 1 in SystemVerilog, have it running on an FPGA and almost completed extending as a toy SoC. I wrote the assembler and UART loader in Rust, but I still need to write the UART FSM that replaces the program in "ROM".

https://github.com/MSamman/hack-soc

Also, if you find TRPL a little slow, Programming Rust goes faster, a bit deeper and I found to be a bit more engaging of a read.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com