First I'd like to say this project represents fantastically impressive achievement regardless.
However, putting this repo through `cloc` reveals the HN title to be rather misleading.
EDIT: I had initially read through {cpu,apu,ppu,gui,joypad,mapper}.{cpp,h} and noticed that the mental tally I was taking had run well over 1000LOC. In my haste I quickly cloned the repository and ran cloc against the current dir which massively inflated the result (Doh!). See author's comment below for a more sensible figure.
Sorry, but that's really not fair. You are running that on all the folders inside the src/ directory (and the README?), including blargg's libraries that I'm using. I'm not counting that. Go ahead and include those if you want. It's code I didn't write, and bigger than the rest of the emulator! I don't think that's representative.
CPU and PPU implementations tend to be in the order of the thousands of lines -- they are around 200 and 300 lines respectively in LaiNES. In fact, most of the code is in the GUI that I could easily strip away if this was a competition. And this wasn't written to be small - it was written to be simple. It also came out small, but that's incidental.
Here's how I counted the lines and how I decided on the description for the repository, which by the way has been catapulted from totally unknown to worldwide attention overnight, and it's now object of unexpected, ruthless scrutiny that I couldn't foresee.
I agree with this figure, please see my edited comment above.
Still though, my gripe with the HN title still stands: to say this is ~1000 LOC is a bit rich. It's still bloody small so why try to shoehorn it into this category?
> And this wasn't written to be small - it was written to be simple. It also came out small, but that's incidental.
I think that why this is pure gold! Because it's simple, it's easy to understand, I would have been hopping with glee if this had been available to me as a teenager, instead of having to read tons of articles/textfiles of varying quality with lots of trial, error and head-scratching.
It's size is besides the point, and why the title is still - in my opinion - misleading. I can't help but feel the very people that would benefit the most from this might possibly be put off that they're going to be presented with some indecipherable demo comp entry.
I believe there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of accuracy, clarity and code size. Note that this repository was more than 3 years old. Maybe this will motivate me to improve it even further.
I think that'd be pretty cool to see. I'd be especially be interested how quickly the returns in size diminish given your starting point. Likewise, how much it'd would have to change architecturally as it gets smaller. Sounds like a slightly more extreme form of the game Shenzen-I/O.
While reading through the repo one thing I kept thinking was it would be nice IMO would be decoupling the everything from the GUI so that it was a little 'flatter'. So `main` would call `NES::run()` (or something), and `NES` would leverage GUI. GUI would be just drawing stuff. (In my head at least,) it feels like that way it might be easier to mentally partition things, for those using it as a learning project. As `NES` would be responsible for ownership and interop that GUI is doing now. I'll add it to my todo list and perhaps in god-knows-when I'll fork it and do this if you haven't gotten round to it :)
Having said that it's inspired me to finish my first Go project which was a GameBoy emulator. Was started mainly to deep-dive the language, but I think it could be useful in a similar way if cleaned up and documented for folks.
I'm guessing that that figure is just for the emulation code. The UI and sound interface code eat up quite a few lines of code. Doesn't hurt to actually dig instead of karma farming...
I had read the repo first and just from counting in my head it was deffo over 1000 lines. Turns out the author agrees, that it's almost 1500 LOC. I was a bit hasty (read: dumb) in generating the table is all :)
Maybe calm down with the "karma farming" accusations, my problem was with the HN title, not the repository.
However, putting this repo through `cloc` reveals the HN title to be rather misleading.
EDIT: I had initially read through {cpu,apu,ppu,gui,joypad,mapper}.{cpp,h} and noticed that the mental tally I was taking had run well over 1000LOC. In my haste I quickly cloned the repository and ran cloc against the current dir which massively inflated the result (Doh!). See author's comment below for a more sensible figure.