Re: The integral type 'byte' (was Re: Suggested method for returning a string from a C program?)

On 26/03/2025 23:51, Scott Lurndal wrote:

bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:

On 26/03/2025 18:09, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

 

8-bit architectures were fine, just a bit short of registers and with
limitation instruction sets. But that is to be expected with only 27,000
transistors on a chip or whatever it was for Z80.
>
(BTW, have a go at emulating such a processor in sofware; tell me in 3
months how you got on.)

 Emulating processors in software is my day job.  It's gone
quite well; the count is up to 8 or nine at this point,
including mainframe, cortex-M and ARMv8.  The last one
is described by about 20,000 pages of documentation,
so emulation isn't simple.
 

This my point. I've seen a Z80 emulator in C which was 4000 lines of tight code, and that is for something considered simple.
(I can't remember if it was emulated at the granularity of clock cycles or coarser. My own attempt worked an instruction at time, but I got up to 12 opcodes before it was put aside, for other reasons.)