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Comment by raphlinus | Hacker News Reader

If you have an Adafruit Fruit Jam, you can run the demo on that board [1]. It can stream 640x480 video off an SD card at 60fps, as well as display a static image from flash.

Also possibly of interest to HN, the decoder[2] is written in a new low level language called symbolasm[3], which seeks to combine the advantages of assembly language (it's possible to reason about and optimize performance with few limits) with some of the affordances of C, especially named variables and struct fields.

[1]: https://github.com/raphlinus/vic-2350

[2]: https://github.com/raphlinus/vic-2350/blob/main/image.sy

[3]: https://github.com/raphlinus/symbolasm

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> especially named variables and struct fields

Don’t you get this from most macro assemblers? I know I’ve seen some very old and crusty ASM that nevertheless does structured programming and even limited OOP through macro-ASM facilities.

(That being said, symbolasm looks 1000x more ergonomic and “also communicates developer intent”-laden than any macro ASM ever did; and also is probably something you could learn once, while a project’s macros are specific to said project.)

I don't believe macro assemblers do a flow-based analysis to verify that the register allocation for variables is consistent; from what I understand the most you get is just a scoped alias for the name of the register. Of course, I could be missing something. If you know of anything beyond the relevant work I cite, please let me know.

I had some similar ideas for an assembler targeting MIPS, I wanted to use symbolic names, reserved within called scopes, and have the assembler find an allocation or error (requiring an explicit decision of what to spill), didn't find relevant examples at the time (circa 2018). Ultimately I decided I was wasting too much time on the assembler and went with global allocations for the most part.

Cool projects! symbolasm looks awesome. Brings back memories of playing around with fasm on MenuetOS and trying to wrap my head around assembler.

At least some of your projects are vibe-coded, right? You mention using LLMs in both some of the repositories and some of your Hacker News comments.

Both the image compression and the symbolasm language started out being entirely hand coded, but I have used Claude to move it forward. I have complicated feelings about this. Basically I would have gotten these results even without the LLM, but it would have taken a lot longer.

I feel like one of the main tasks in front of us as an industry right now is to figure out how to use LLMs well, how to create quality and resist slop. As part of that, I'm taking care to write the prose myself.

I totally understand how any LLM usage can be a turnoff, though. I've felt that myself.

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