Re:Minimalism in programming language design
by flohofwoe on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @07:53AM
(#31490839)
These 'frontend web projects' are all written in C, or a mix of C and C++ though (and I'd wager that doing the same thing in JS would have been more difficult, at least the emulator stuff which is mostly bit twiddling code):
The common pattern is though that both the C and C++ stdlib are mostly useless for this type of project, you need cross-platform libraries where 'cross-platform' also includes peculiarities of the web browser runtime, specific language features are (mostly) irrelevant in this case - except maybe for the bit twiddling thing in the emulators where C is clearly superior to JS (plus you get lean native versions "for free" without requiring a heavy Electron runtime).
https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/
https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/
https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/
The common pattern is though that both the C and C++ stdlib are mostly useless for this type of project, you need cross-platform libraries where 'cross-platform' also includes peculiarities of the web browser runtime, specific language features are (mostly) irrelevant in this case - except maybe for the bit twiddling thing in the emulators where C is clearly superior to JS (plus you get lean native versions "for free" without requiring a heavy Electron runtime).