Matt Keeter // Raven

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2024-07-06 17:00:06

I have a soft spot for fictional computers, having implemented compilers, bytecode interpreters, and even program synthesis for various made-up computer architectures.

Unlike many fictional computers, the Uxn + Varvara ecosystem is sophisticated enough for actual use, and there are dozens of different ROMs – everything from text editors to drawing programs to synthesizers.

The Hundred Rabbits devlog motivates this design with far more eloquence than I could offer; I'd encourage you to browse their sprawling wiki of documentation, blog posts, and development notes.

You can try out the GUI online! It includes several example ROMs, or you can bring your own; load them by dragging-and-dropping them into the window.

My implementation of the Uxn CPU is in the raven-uxn crate. It's 10-20% faster than the reference implementation on compute-heavy workloads, and is written in 100% safe Rust.

High performance was an explicit goal of this project, so I'm pleased with how well it turned out. I'm also pleased by the quality of the code: I didn't have to make many sacrifices to reach these speeds.