WATaBoy: JIT-Ing Game Boy Instructions to WASM Beats a Native Interpreter

114 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by energeticbark

9 Comments

mikepurvis

7 minutes ago

I've always really enjoyed Andrew Kelley's article about trying to statically recompile NES code from 2013 [1]. Basically he makes a ton of progress but gets hung up not just on the realities of the handwritten assembler of the era just not being all that great at mapping to higher level LLVM IR. In the conclusion he specifically calls out a JIT-type methodology as probably being the way to go, where you live-recompile the hot paths when you have the runtime data required to actually understand them, and don't worry about the parts you can't.

Very cool to see something like that in action.

[1]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html

ahartmetz

2 hours ago

Of course it beats a native interpreter. WASM overhead is about 20%, interpreter overhead is about 1000%.

What's cool here is to have a GameBoy JIT runtime at all.

grashalm

an hour ago

It's two jits in total.

dag100

3 hours ago

This is an incredible project for an undergraduate. Very impressive. Interesting to note that Firefox is 25% slower than Chrome/Safari, I wonder why.

milch

3 hours ago

Very interesting article. Would've been fun to see the comparison between native interpreter & JIT-on-WASM on iOS as well

jonny_eh

an hour ago

So it's a JIT-in-JIT? JiJIT?

iberator

3 hours ago

yet on real old hardware it would be 20x slower in real life. same as all native javascript junk - its fast, but non usuable on older hardware

qweqwe14

an hour ago

Here's a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer.

switchbak

2 hours ago

Good thing I'm not running games on my 4gb Pentium 4 then.