CppCon 2016: Jason Turner “Rich Code for Tiny Computers: A Simple Commodore 64 Game in C++17”

I think this way of looking at it old. Even if the const-ness is somehow subverted without generating an error then most compilers (or at least GCC and Clang) will presume the code is compliant and make optimizations following what the standard allows. This potentially results in undefined behavior when that pointer you mentioned is used to modified a thing that ought to be const. Consider the amount of optimizations seen in the video from CppCon 2016: [this video] Jason Turner, the presenter, is writing code a few lines at a time and cross compiling for the Commodore 64. He shows his assembly at many steps of the way and shows how many functions are completely elided when const (and later constexpr) are used correctly. There are a ton of other good talks from CppCon 2016 including one about const and what optimizations it makes possible and several about how compilers are more willing to "break" code that is non-compliant by making its behavior undefined. None of it really shocking or new, unless you have been writing to one compiler implementation instead of to the standard.

> Nor does it have any concern for the elegance of its design. It has a lot of inelegant facilities, which, when used under the hood, allow you to express your elegant abstractions. > Hence the common practice of using a small subset C++ and pretending it's just C with Extras. That's mostly failure to use C++. Since C++11, and especially with later updates to the standard, idiomatic C++ is very different from C - even if you're not using a lot of the standard library. I'll link to a talk already linked-to in another comment in this discussion: Rich code for tiny computers / Jason Turner, CppCon 2016 [this video]

C maps to the machine well. (Low-level programmers will probably crucify me for that.) But take its lack of closures as an example. Closures require either some kind of memory management, or clever program transformations, at which point you lose the simplicity of just having the stack and heap. As much as a generation of Java programmers (like myself) grew up thinking that C++ was old hat and Java was its natural successor, C++ has been quietly ahead of Java with regard to lambdas, generics, type-level trickery. Not to mention performance and backward-compatibility [1]. But reading C++ makes my eyes bleed. I much prefer FP for business logic and web-app development. Haskell is fast but it's no C++, and that's OK. I wouldn't want Haskell to take C/C++ market-share. I want it to compete against other languages that don't give me performance, safety or terseness. [1] C++17 on the Commodore 64: [this video]

I have an ET-3400 on the shelf behind me! I was just playing with it the other day. After watching Jason Turner's CppCon talk on writing an i386 to 6502 assembly translator [1][2], I started working on a fork that would target the 6800. I only got about 3 instructions working, but that's really all you need for some really simple test code with optimization turned to the max. It also turns out that someone wrote a fantastic emulator specifically for the ET-3400 trainer [3], and I managed to get my application running on it! [1] [this video] [2] [link] [3] [link] There is something special to me about the idea of writing modern C++, and compiling it for such early microprocessors. The 512 bytes of RAM is a pretty big limitation though. I wanted to try and emulate an EEPROM using an Arduino or FPGA, but got stalled out on the project. From time to time I like to browse through the LLVM backend documentation, but I can't seem to commit to trying to build a backend.