zun
TL;DR: Paranoia about impermanence of software made me implement an Uxn emulator (which is a part of the permacomputing direction).
So the last couple of months, I basically had a small internal software crisis, as I realized that most software that exists out there won’t work everywhere and isn’t really independent, even if it doesn’t have dependencies.
So I could write a program in Zig, compile it statically for x86_64 linux and have it run on basically any computer out there. But what happens when either Linux-based OSes get worse and worse or all computers with an x86_64 processor suddenly die (or when Zig dies, which it hopefully won’t)? It’s not that likely, but there aren’t really solutions to those problems.
Some time ago before this crisis, I found some resources on permacomputing, including links to Uxn. And then, in that “crisis”, I remembered permacomputing and Uxn; so I decided to implement my own Uxn emulator in Zig.
And there it is: https://codeberg.org/sfiedler/zun.
I don’t know if Uxn solves the problem of impermanence for me (because it’s a 16-bit processor and 64KiB is really small and working with banks isn’t that fun), but it’s a project I started at some point and wanted to finish. Still, I’ll have some fun writing code in Uxntal (Uxn assembly) during the next couple of weeks.
Supported Zig versions
0.17.0
As AI is another dependence (and thus doesn’t solve my original problems with software impermanence) and as the lifetime of one AI model is much less than the lifetime of e.g. the Uxn spec, I didn’t use any AI for this tool (as with any other software project by me).