Utterly brilliant. It's inspiring to see a modern microservices architecture approach used to such great effect. While the performance penalty seems somewhat steep at first blush, we know this problem solves itself as computers get faster. And in return we get a library of highly portable opcodes which can be efficiently re-purposed by other processor implementations.
Agreed. This is the way of the future. Is there a subscription model? I'd like myself a CPU-as-a-service. $50-100 a month seems reasonable.
Using these "efficiently repurposable" building blocks we can even create new software! Ultimate composability. I'll rent you a couple of instructions and you can create whatever turing-completeness your heart desires for the low, low cost of $0.01 per instruction. (I will have to send all your data to our headquarters in Russia and China, but only occasionally.)
Did anyone patent this already? Time to jump on this.
To anyone who might be confused, the parent and gradparent posts (mine) are intended to be comedic, consistent with the tone and spirit of the article itself.
What interesting software could be emulated from when CPUs had clock rates in the 1-3 kHz range, the reasonable performance target for this advanced technology? According to Wikipedia, the ENIAC operated at about 5 kHz.
Some of this seems slightly tongue-in-cheek, especially this part:
"As can be seen from the screenshot above, space invaders as deployed onto an AKS cluster runs at ~1KHz which gives us ample time for debugging but does make actually playing it slightly difficult."
Nonetheless it does still seem like an interesting technical exercise creating a 'distributed emulator' implemented using services, even if it's too slow to be of much use. :)
I've been considering a project to build a basic emulator (Game Boy, maybe?) entirely in Redux, with React for pixel rendering. I'm sure the performance will be awful, but it would be an interesting exercise.
This satire is judging a professional-technical assault on civilization by the criteria of useful, self-contained tools. As you laugh at the spiritual abortions who wrangle kubernetes for a living, they laugh back, even louder, all the way to the bank.
That's the joke, though: that C++ is looked down on with distain and treated as an obsolete language by some members of the younger generation of programmers.
