57 karma · joined January 4, 2019
There's more to get from these than just aesthetics, precisely because they're not curated.
a) thats awesome b) I am taking a wild leap in deducing you're the same retro-games Benj Edwards journalist that was part of the infamous Retronauts East team. Just wanted to say i always quite enjoyed your presence :)
Yosys functions more like a software open source tool. So command line compiling. It also has a REPL. It is very quick compared to the commercial solutions. Especially around compile times which can take seconds instead of minutes. YMMV, but I think the consensus is that it's a lot more convenient to use.
In general the hardware toolchains feel very ancient compared to software toolchains.
Also, Forth sports a repl.
The tooling doesn't seem to have changed all that much from back in the day, which isn't a bad thing: the best way to get music on the GBA is still to compose something in an old-fashioned tracker and using Maxmod to import it. Sprite conversion tools haven't changed that much.
Programming it is just so lovely bare-metal: poking/prodding registers, writing backgrounds and sprites into memory regions.. Really fun stuff.
That said, those kind of olden CPU's aren't a terribly snug fit for LLVM, due to their peculiarities. You'll have to bend LLVM quite a bit to bend it to your will, which also means that you need to get quite familiar with it as well.
edit: this tutorial is even older still, but for me it was one of the best resources, next to checking other simple backends: https://jonathan2251.github.io/lbd/llvmstructure.html
Basically Quicklisp is your CL package manager, and ASDF is your makefile.
Just jump on the flat at the end gets me over 700.
My plan at the time was to use a serial protocol and interface with a Nintendo GBA/DS for this kind of interactive Lisp programming.
It feels a bit dirty mixing implementation and target language like this, but it's great fun to program for.
That author is just not aware of his heritage.