Collected this weekend's updates to my Smalltalk-80 VM into a new wasm build. (You may need to shift-reload it to get it to work if you've visited before.)

https://cliffle.com/tmp-st80/

There's now a speed selector to experience what was considered "barely usable" back in 1983 (5000 bytecodes/sec, not remotely usable by modern standards). And the VM is complete enough to run "Benchmark testStandardTests."

If you crank up the speed knob (and have enough host CPU) the standard tests complete in 537 ms, which is pretty darn fast, and compares favorably with Rochus Keller's optimized C++ VM, despite my rather naive display routines.

#Smalltalk #rust

i present: "scheme" compiler in ~600 lines of C, via wasm GC

https://git.lain.faith/iitalics/scm2wasm/src/branch/main

Warning: this sociology paper by Mike Michael is a rabbit hole, leading to other rabbit holes - fascinating, occasionally hilarious & sometimes downright bizarre...

It's about what the author calls "lay metrology".

That's describing measurements in terms that are presumed to give lay people a sense of the proportion - like saying something's "twice the size of Wales"....

1/5

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09636625231186782

Sometimes you just want to look at some colorful "no known copyright" endpapers. Feel free to reuse!

These are all from books published between 1890 and 1930. Scanned by the Bergen Public Library in Norway. #endpapers

Image credit: Bergen Public Library on Flickr Commons https://www.flickr.com/photos/bergen_public_library/albums/72157633827993925