Comment by flohofwoe
5 hours ago
It's the equivalent of porting Unreal Engine 5 to another language and then using it exclusively to run a 2D Tetris clone. Let's wait for the next Bun release when more real-world code is hammering it before declaring victory.
(also, fwiw, a manual rewrite would be under the same scrunity and suffer from the same skepticism, at least when obviously rushed).
If you ported UE5 to, idfk, Malbolge and ran Tetris on it and someone would dismiss it as “not impressive”, I would think they lost the plot too!
A human doing it is impressive. A human performing many computations a computer could do would be impressive. I don't get impressed when a computer computes a number. A language machine translating is just... doing what a language machine does? When a language machine starts doing something other than translation, I will be impressed. If computers starting singing without any human intervention, for example, would be incredible! C3PO knows many languages—he may know Rust and Zig. C3PO translating from Zig to Rust isn't surprising to me. Sounds par the course for a robot who knows languages.
LLMs are very impressive. Five years ago, the idea that we'd have software that you could ask - in English, mind you! - to rewrite an entire server side JS runtime and you'd get something which even kind of worked was squarely in the realm of science fiction. But the question isn't "is this impressive?", but rather "should the results of such a rewrite be relied upon?" (and specific to this thread, "is the fact that a use case which only touches a small subset of the features of said result appears to no be completely broken good evidence it should be?")
If you could successfully write Tetris in Malbolge, I would call that impressive indeed. Just writing Hello World was a major effort IIRC. The nature of the malbolge interpreter makes it more of a cryptography exercise than a coding one.
I'm gonna jump in here with some self promo - back in college I TA'd a class that, for a few weeks, taught Malbolge, and the only assignment was for students to write a program that printed their name.
After spending a lot of time thinking about the language, I came up with a relatively simple algorithm based on the language design - there are a few operators that mutate state, so basically just try combinations of those until your next memory cell contains the thing that you want, then lock those instructions in and advance.
Basically RNG yourself to victory.
The original code for that algorithm is here (python, + my own interpreter): https://github.com/wallstop/malbolge-toolkit/tree/dd942fb981...
I've since llmified it as an exercise.
BUT! The whole reason for this comment is to nerd say that printing stuff is relatively easy if you invest the time in learning the language's primitives and think of programming in it more as algorithms to operate on the op codes instead of literally writing code.
Now, to do more interesting things other than printing - I'd have to spend even more time thinking about the language, which I don't want to
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"I ported .NET framework to x86 bare metal. Here's hello world as proof."
You just compared Rust to Malbolge :)
"I ported .NET Framework to x86 bare metal. Here's proof using Hello World."
Is it though? What’s your source for that data?
You have absolutely no way to know this though.
Like, come on already.