> I've heard people wax poetic about programming old, limited-memory machines. I wouldn't know anything about those---at the time they were current, I was writing rudimentary number-guessing games in BASIC. But doing this competition entry gave me a taste of what they might be talking about.
One rather big difference here though, the limitation is on the size of the code, not the compiled binary. Most of the "optimizations" here have little to no effect on the code after it's compiled.
With older computers, instead of removing line breaks from the code, you're doing things like tweaking compiler flags to shrink the size.
I think he meant for competitions that judge binary size. Handwritten assembly could even increase the size (like unfolding loops) and it wouldn't matter if the speed was improved.
This person is also the author of CodeMirror and ProseMirror, the best choices in my opinion for plain text editing and rich text editing respectively for the web platform
I can't recommend "return true to win" (https://alf.nu/ReturnTrue) enough to learn how to golf JS. I think it's more accessible to learn one 10-20 char snippet at a time than a big project like a 1k submission.
No need for graphics. In the 80s, when MS-DOS was popular but graphic cards were expensive, ASCII games were very popular and pretty fun. Not having bitmaps greatly reduces binary size.
“Bytes” is not an arbitrary definition in the contest. Any use of an emoji takes 4 bytes. Some of these new combined ones can be 25+ bytes when accounting for zero width joiners, variant selectors, and modifiers. Technically you can pack nearly as much data as you like into a single legal Unicode glyph (think infinite zalgo text) if you just want to have the thought experiment.
Unicode is a nightmare, but I’m glad everyone agrees to share the same nightmare.
Go have a look at https://beta.dwitter.net - many of the examples there use this technique to fit more than 140 bytes into the "dweet" (many are also less than 140 characters, so don't need to use this compression technique). There is a convenient "compressed" switch to "decompress" the code. The rule on dwitter.net is no more than 140 characters (not 140 bytes).
One rather big difference here though, the limitation is on the size of the code, not the compiled binary. Most of the "optimizations" here have little to no effect on the code after it's compiled.
With older computers, instead of removing line breaks from the code, you're doing things like tweaking compiler flags to shrink the size.
https://github.com/nanochess/Invaders
https://www.dosgames.com/tag/ascii
I wonder these days if anyone is using multi-character emoji (don't know what do you call those exactly) to compress more data in 1024 "bytes"?
Since HackerNews does not allow emojis, here is a demo of what I mean:
https://output.jsbin.com/nebemihuhe
[1] https://js1k.com/2013-spring/demo/1426
Unicode is a nightmare, but I’m glad everyone agrees to share the same nightmare.
[1] https://js1024.fun/