Opinion: PPC, 68080 and other

[Pyromania]

@hammer

Okay, well maybe the Vampire V4+ GIGA is not for you then. You will miss out on SAGA applications & games, Arne Boosted Audio replacing Paula, Isabel - Improved Video Replacement to Lisa, Anni - Improved Alice DMA chip and all the other cool stuff coming out for it but enjoy the solutions you have setup for yourself. A FireBird V4 could have made one of your A500 machines way more sexy. But if you're not into it yet, that's understood.

[indigolemon]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

You will miss out on SAGA applications & games, Arne Boosted Audio replacing Paula, Isabel - Improved Video Replacement to Lisa, Anni - Improved Alice DMA chip and all the other cool stuff coming out for it

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Most applications today are web applications.
...
So just having hardware with 'decent performance' won't cut it.

I am sure a browser on something equivalent to 1GHz 080 would be ok.
Anyways ... If you are primarily using the web it makes no real difference, if your browser is on your local machine or something remote like AmiFox.

Amifox is a still a little rough around the edges, but the concept is fine.

I would love a combined version of a native browser for lighter or older pages and remote rendering for newer pages - maybe some day...

Trying to do it with anything that could in any way be called an Amiga will be problematic.

Not really - only If you have a specific problem with calling a modern interpretation of the Amiga concept an "Amiga". I personally don't care about the name as long as it feels right.

Nobody wants that, so why bother?

So I am nobody?
Maybe stop projecting your personal preferences on everybody else?

Just use a PC and be happy.

I listed a bunch of reasons, why I am not happy with current PCs ... and there are many more. That's why I personally don't have one ... it is terrible enough to be forced to use them at work. Mac is a little bit better on the surface ... but not if you look deeper.

All true. But that's the way it has to be.

Fatalism kills any progress.

To much is invested in the current ecosystem for any dramatic improvements to be made.

As you pointed out:
Almost everything shifted to the web in the last decades - and this trend is still going on. So the underlaying operating systems and or hardware architecture is today much less important than it was for decades.

Chips will be designed by AI and programmed by AI. We will not be able to understand the code, and will just have to 'trust' that it's doing the job better than we can (which will almost certainly be true).

This will take longer than you think ... but if AI arrives at this level it will probably have a self interest in reducing complexity of systems.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Amifox is a still a little rough around the edges, but the concept is fine.

No, it's terrible.

I would love a combined version of a native browser for lighter or older pages and remote rendering for newer pages - maybe some day...

I would be happy with websites making pages accessible to browsers with lesser capabilities, like they are supposed to. I would be even happier if they let clients choose whether they want cycle-sucking encryption or not.

But this won't happen because nobody cares about us. The internet always was and always will be about making money. The entire Web is now just an advertising platform, with content only provided in the hope that while viewing it you will buy products. And since one of those products is a device to get on the net, there is no incentive to make it work with anything but the latest commercial products.

Even EAB is guilty of it - hugely ironical that a website for users of Amiga computers makes it difficult for us to actually use an Amiga to access it.

Not really - only If you have a specific problem with calling a modern interpretation of the Amiga concept an "Amiga". I personally don't care about the name as long as it feels right.

Names do matter though, otherwise it causes confusion.

I listed a bunch of reasons, why I am not happy with current PCs ... and there are many more. That's why I personally don't have one ... it is terrible enough to be forced to use them at work. Mac is a little bit better on the surface ... but not if you look deeper.

There are a bunch of reasons to not be happy with AmigaOS too.

Almost everything shifted to the web in the last decades - and this trend is still going on. So the underlaying operating systems and or hardware architecture is today much less important than it was for decades.

Not entirely true. Problem is that few platforms are capable of hosting the required software. Right now we have Chrome with 65% desktop market share, Edge 13%, Safari 9%, Firefox 7% and Opera 3%. Of those, only Firefox is open source. It has 21 million lines of source code. It only officially runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS. Porting it to another platform will be a nightmare, and keeping it up to date even worse.

So I am nobody?
Maybe stop projecting your personal preferences on everybody else?

Let me rephrase that. Only a masochist wants to make life difficult for themselves by using a platform that will be problematic.

if AI arrives at this level it will probably have a self interest in reducing complexity of systems.

That's very unlikely.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Let me rephrase that. Only a masochist wants to make life difficult for themselves by using a platform that will be problematic.

Judging by the number of Windows users, the world is full of masochists.

What I am proposing is a more blissful way of doing computer related things.

That's very unlikely.

AI is supposed to be based on a neural network, that weighs solutions according to probability - trained by feedback.
Ultimately this leads in most cases to find the simplest solution to a problem - kind of an artificial Occam's razor.

If AI is at one day capable of designing its own "offspring", it will take the energy demand into account and realize that reducing complexity will reduce energy demand and free resources needed in other areas of the next gen AI.
All this will improve the chances of "survival" of such offspring against competing AIs.

It is our very human approach that leads to more complexity - not only in computing but in all areas of legislation and regulation. An entity driven by logic and/or Darwinistic principles will avoid such inefficient systems.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Even EAB is guilty of it - hugely ironical that a website for users of Amiga computers makes it difficult for us to actually use an Amiga to access it.

Yeah, it's almost as if there's a conspiracy to keep the Amiga off the internet. I mean with all the capable browsers readily available it just has to be!

[Karlos]

I like how JS is the biggest complaint for browser developers. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest but it underscores the point that what is technically one of the worst programming languages ever conceived is now one of the most dominant.

I had hoped that WASM would've matured enough by now to render it obsolete. Let front end application code be compiled from a type strict language to portable binary and executed by a JIT (sounds like Java putting it that way). But as with anything web related, JS just metastasised over everything.

[Samurai_Crow]

@Karlos

WASM inside the browser is not useful to Amigans but the WASI standard is looking more hopeful. That's WASM applied to application development.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

@Karlos

WASM inside the browser is not useful to Amigans but the WASI standard is looking more hopeful. That's WASM applied to application development.

Who's talking about Amiga users? I'm talking about everyone else. JavaScript continues to add syntactical sugar and surface polish to what is, at its core, an absolute ball of turd.

The guts of it are literally rotten, but it has become all pervasive. Have a look at the crazy nontransitive behaviours it has, the silent promotion of integer (which it doesn't really have) to floating point. Which other languages can you name that have a numeric type (basically a double precision float) that you can create an array of, sort and the default behaviour is to sort the values alphabetically, resulting in absurdities like 1, 11, 2, 22, 3...

There are decades of insane poisonous behaviour that can't be removed because half the front of the web end would break. The only way to get away from it is to do it wholesale, which is why front end application development needs to adopt compiling better languages to WASM. All major browsers support it now and what happens? People start compiling bloody JavaScript to it. No matter what you do for them, they reach for the same battered set of crayons every time.

[Thomas Richter]

There is not really a need to write in javascript anymore - there are alternatives that are compiled to javascript, for example Google GWT. It's java code, so you have the advantages of java with proper type checking at compile time, and you compile it to javascript for deployment.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

lfor example Google GWT

Can’t wait for it to get discontinued 12 months from now after Google launches 3 similar products only to lose interest shortly after (hi Flutter)!

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

There is not really a need to write in javascript anymore - there are alternatives that are compiled to javascript, for example Google GWT. It's java code, so you have the advantages of java with proper type checking at compile time, and you compile it to javascript for deployment.

Nobody does. JavaScript will remain forever unless bold steps are taken to properly deprecate it. Which won't happen either.

[TCD]

You guys really take thread derailment to the next level.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Nobody does. JavaScript will remain forever unless bold steps are taken to properly deprecate it. Which won't happen either.

I'm doing my part by only coding in Pascal and BASIC. And that extends to my professional career too!

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

@Karlos

WASM inside the browser is not useful to Amigans but the WASI standard is looking more hopeful. That's WASM applied to application development.

In deed: WASI, the WebAssembly System Interface, could be a new chance for all Amiga-like systems.

And no: this does not automatically mean bloated apps that need hundreds of MB. There are quite a lot of projects using WebAssembly on Arduino and other "embedded" hardware.

https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3

WASM3 is a tiny but fast WebAssebly interpreter
Minimum useful system requirements: ~64Kb for code and ~10Kb RAM

(the 68k target is commented out at the moment and probably needs fixing)

Running on the Nintendo DS:
https://softwayre.com/blog/2021/09/1...ur-nintendo-ds

A Jump&Run game on Arduino:
https://x.com/vshymanskyy/status/1345048053041029121

[Samurai_Crow]

Re:WASI

There's always W2C2 if you need more speed. (Though the example codes with it would need a 68020 and a lot of fast RAM.) Rust compiler to WASI? Yes, please!