TinyComputers.io

Featured Programming Languages, Language Design

A Stack-Based Bytecode VM for Lattice: 100 Opcodes, Serialization, and a Self-Hosted Compiler

 · 15 min read

A deep dive into the Lattice bytecode VM — a stack-based virtual machine with 100 opcodes, computed goto dispatch, pre-compiled concurrency sub-chunks, an ephemeral bump arena for string temporaries, a binary .latc serialization format, and a self-hosted compiler written in Lattice itself. Covers the instruction set architecture, upvalue-based closures, how structured concurrency compiles without AST dependency, and validation across 815 tests under AddressSanitizer.

Sponsors

Recent Articles

Programming & Software Development

Rue: Steve Klabnik's AI-Assisted Experiment in Memory Safety Without the Pain

 · 14 min read

A comprehensive review of Rue, a new systems programming language designed by Steve Klabnik and implemented primarily with Claude AI. Rue explores whether memory safety without garbage collection can be achieved more accessibly than Rust through affine types and mutable value semantics instead of a borrow checker. After a deep dive into Rue's features, type system, borrow-and-inout model, and the AI-assisted development story behind it, we evaluate what the language delivers today, what it's missing, and whether it points toward a real alternative for systems programmers frustrated by Rust's learning curve.
Book Reviews

Review of "Crafting Interpreters" by Robert Nystrom

 · 11 min read

A review of "Crafting Interpreters" by Robert Nystrom, a book that guides readers through building two complete interpreters for the same language—first a tree-walk interpreter in Java, then a bytecode virtual machine in C. Nystrom's conversational writing style, hand-drawn illustrations, and incremental approach to complexity produce one of the best programming books in recent memory, transforming what could be an intimidating academic subject into an engaging, hands-on journey through scanning, parsing, scope resolution, closures, classes, inheritance, and garbage collection.
benchmarks

Image Editing on 10-Year-Old GPUs: NVIDIA P40 vs AMD Strix Halo

 · 17 min read

A deep dive into running FireRed-Image-Edit, a 57.7GB diffusion model, on two wildly different GPU platforms: four 10-year-old NVIDIA Tesla P40s from 2016 and a single AMD Strix Halo APU from 2025. Covers the precision and quantization challenges of Pascal GPUs, multi-GPU device orchestration, and the surprising performance parity between decade-old datacenter hardware and a modern integrated GPU.
View All Articles →