yeah, the chip-8 design is less ambitious than the uxn design and can only really handle very limited programs. on the other hand, it does run on much smaller hardware

i wouldn't go so far as to say uxn is flawed; that suggests it's fundamentally unsound. as far as i know, it isn't; it's a perfectly workable design, and it's better than anything else so far for frugal write-once-run-anywhere. i think a different design would be better in important ways, but vaporware is always better than actually implemented systems

> One of the motivating factors for 100r was that Xcode is bad fit for people who live on a boat with solar-powered computers. So are Visual Studio or PyCharm.

that's true, but you're damning uxn with faint praise here. i suspected that if you benchmarked left¹ (which, incidentally, does do syntax highlighting) against a default configuration of vim or gnu emacs, you'd find that left is the one that consumes the most power

but then i tried it, and also compared an extremely minimal editor called `ae`, and left seems to use a third as much power as emacs, but five times as much as vim and 300 times as much as ae

ae and left could plausibly run on the zorzpad. vim and emacs cannot; they need far too much ram. ae and left also have in common that they both lack undo, but left is dramatically more capable and easier to use

— emacs power usage —

i've been running my current emacs process for a week and (not counting cpu time used by the x server) it's used 34 minutes and 15 seconds of cpu, which is about 0.3% of one core of this amd ryzen 3500u. if we estimate that the cpu draws 29 more watts from the battery when running full-speed than when completely idle, and can run about 3 instructions per clock per core on each of 4 cores and 3.1 gigahertz working out to 36 billion instructions per second, emacs is consuming about 90 milliwatts and running about 100 million instructions per second on average

that's a lot higher than i expected, and possibly actually higher than left (i haven't tested) but it's certainly not in the same league as vscode. (this is emacs 28.2, and somewhat to my surprise, system-configuration-options tells me it's built --with-native-compilation, so perhaps it's not using the inefficient old bytecode interpreter.)

as a more precise test, to test emacs's built-in ide functionality rather than gtk and my proliferation of elisp packages, i ran `valgrind --tool=cachegrind emacs -q -nw --no-site-file` and wrote this c program in it:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
char buf[256];
printf("What's your name? ");
fflush(stdout);
fgets(buf, sizeof buf, stdin);
for (char *p = buf; *p; p++) if (*p == '\n') *p = '\0';
printf("Oh, hi, %s! Lovely to meet you!\n", buf);
return 0;
}

syntax highlighting was enabled, but -nw runs it in the terminal. i compiled it, fixed bugs in it (at first i didn't have any but i wanted to ensure i was doing a fair test), jumped to error message locations, jumped to system header files, looked up manual pages in it, ran a unix shell in it, and ran the program in the unix shell and interacted with it

this took about four minutes and 8.8 billion instructions. (just starting up emacs and shutting it down that way takes 595 million, but i wanted to get an estimate of the steady state.) this is about 30–40 million instructions per second, not counting the instructions of the compiler, shell, terminal emulator, and x-windows server; so 100 million per second with a more elaborate configuration and larger files seems like a plausible estimate

— ae power usage —

i wrote the same program again in anthony howe's 'ant's editor' from 01991⁰, which is about 300 lines of c in its non-obfuscated form, and is roughly the simplest programming editor you can actually use; the user interface is a stripped-down version of vi
where you exit insert mode with control-l, write the file with
capital w, and exit with capital q. this took about 7 minutes (i kept hitting the wrong keys) and 39 million instructions, of which about 0.8 million were startup and shutdown. that's about 90 thousand instructions per second, or 100 microwatts: a thousand times faster than emacs, and within the capabilities of a commodore 64 or apple ][. of course that again doesn't account for the window system, compiler, and terminal emulator, but it does account for ncurses computing the minimal updates necessary to the screen, so it's most of the work needed to avoid redrawing unchanged areas

38 million instructions divided by 278 bytes of output is about 137000 instructions per byte, but of course moving around in a larger file takes longer

— uxn left power usage —

running uxnemu left.rom in the same way from https://rabbits.srht.site/uxn/uxn-essentials-lin64.tar.gz takes 481 million instructions to start up and shut down. writing the same c in left.rom took about 5 minutes and 3.4 billion instructions; 3 billion instructions over 5 minutes is about 10 million instructions per second. this suggests that it uses about a third as much power as emacs and 110 times as much power as ae

10 million interpreted bytecode instructions per second is really pushing the limits of what the zorzpad can do. also its window is by default 684×374, about 33% bigger than the zorzpad's two screens put together, and it doesn't seem to be resizable (which i assume means it's not designed to be able to handle being resized)

— vim power usage —

finally, i did it again with vim in a terminal emulator, with syntax highlighting and manual page lookup, and vim took 680 million instructions, exactly one fifth of what left took. it took me less time, but i don't think vim does any background computation. as with ae, vim's time includes the time to compute minimal screen updates (confirmed with `asciinema rec vimtest`)

______

⁰ http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/ae.c

¹ https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/left.html