XXIIVV — now lie in it
Autumn is just around the corner, and when the leaves begin to fall, it will have been four years since the early sketches of a personal computing system which became Uxn. I thought it would be interesting to look back and see what has happened since.
Uxn was designed explicitly to be a minimal bytecode target capable of preserving a handful of our projects, and to be flexible enough to accommodate the ones we had yet to make, in a way that would be portable and robust against bitrot.
In regard to preservation, time will tell if it was a success, but I can say that it has taken 3 years for the ISA to be frozen, and the tail end of that period only saw subtle changes that did not impact the projects made in the first two. The remaining work during that time was primarily finding, documenting and testing against the remaining undefined behaviors.
During these four years, I have seen countless developers successfully implement the runtime from scratch without my help; this is giving me hope that for as long as the documentation survives, developers can create new emulators as the hardware platforms and operating systems continue to evolve.
