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A comment on Halfix – A portable x86 emulator written in C99.

Re:Halfix – A portable x86 emulator written in C99 by userbinator on Sunday October 09, 2022 @09:40PM (#33146987)
Performance isn't terrible, but it isn't fantastic either (70-100 MIPS native, 10-30 MIPS browser)

Those screenshots must've taken some extreme patience. Especially that Windows 10 one. 70-100 MIPS is roughly a fast 486. It sounds like this isn't even a JIT, unlike QEMU's emulation mode, and the latter is already quite noticeably slower when running modern OSs on modern hardware.

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Re:Halfix – A portable x86 emulator written in C99 by mburee on Monday October 10, 2022 @02:02AM (#33148271)
Can't take more than a couple of hours, if booting linux to an X session only took about a day on an AVR
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Re:Halfix – A portable x86 emulator written in C99 by ClassyJacket on Monday October 10, 2022 @07:56AM (#33150252)
Forgive me if this is wrong/ignorant, but you can't really do a JIT and keep it portable, no?
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Re:Halfix – A portable x86 emulator written in C99 by wolf550e on Monday October 10, 2022 @10:00AM (#33151504)
Right, but it kinda depends on what you mean by "portable". Only an interpreter will work without modification on a new host arch, but code for a JIT that is organized in such a way that makes it easy to add support for new host arch might also be called "portable".
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Re:Halfix – A portable x86 emulator written in C99 by euclaise on Monday October 10, 2022 @08:23PM (#33157995)
If I recall correctly, QEMU did portable JIT by implementing the instructions in C and then copying their compiled versions out of the emulator binary instead of calling them as functions.
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