Top all-time · #590
Andre Weissflog
Personal blog · floooh.github.ioprogramminggames
Andre Weissflog writes The Brain Dump, a personal blog at floooh.github.io about programming and games. Since 2014, 102 different Hacker News readers have linked it 407 times, most often “Handles are the better pointers”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link floooh.github.io for Andre Weissflog's writing on WebGL, handles versus pointers and C, plus his emulator and sokol demos.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- Called a writeup 'nice' and the handles articles' ideas 'good'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
This is the blog and personal web page of Andre Weissflog (Floh, floooh, flohofwoe) mostly about programming stuff.
Most-linked posts?
- Handles are the better pointers32 people · 53 mentions · first linked 2018-06-17
- Tiny Emus: 8-Bit emulators8 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2018-06-28
- Modern C for C++ Peeps8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-09-27
- Thoughts about a WebGL-Next8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-08-13
- A new cycle-stepped 6502 CPU emulator5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-12-13
- /sokol-html5/index.html5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-12-11
- Zig and Emulators5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-08-24
- WebAssembly Demystified4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-06-09
- WASM Debugging with Emscripten and VSCode3 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2023-11-11
- Sokol – minimal cross-platform standalone C headers3 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-03-11
What Hacker News says?
AFAIK tagged-index-handles are typically used for this (where the tag is a generation-counter to detect 'dangling handles'), which more or less side-steps the borrow checker restrictions (e.g. see https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html ).
Comment linking /2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
on “Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years”Submitted One year of C as a story · 303 points
HN discussionAudio worklets are a step into the right direction for streaming audio, but for a simple audio-streaming API you don't need the complex node-based architecture of WebAudio, you just need a JS callback which writes samples into an ArrayBuffer. With audio worklets this callbacks runs in a separate audio thread, and with the (deprecated) ScriptProcessNode this callback runs on the main thread. E.g. a "good" web audio A…
Comment linking /tiny8bit/
on “WASM 3.0 Completed”Submitted Visual6502 Remix as a story · 205 points
HN discussionI think the emscripten and NaCl (core) teams should concentrate on the tool chain, not on UI tools or IDE integration, IDE support is only useful with full debugger support, and that's a massive amount of work, and I guess every new version of Visual Studio requires a lot more work. I spent a bit of time to write a set of python cmake wrapper scripts which make cross-compiling to 'esoteric' targets easier (see here:…
Comment linking /fips/
on “From Asm.js to WebAssembly”Submitted Handles are the better pointers as a story · 194 points
HN discussionhttps://floooh.github.io/2017/12/10/z80-emu-evolution.html Based on this article I think RPi will not handle cycle accurate emulation at this level of performance, but it could easily do instruction level emulation.
Comment linking /2017/12/10/z80-emu-evolution.html
on “ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop”Submitted Tiny Emus: 8-Bit emulators as a story · 178 points
HN discussionThere's also the alternative of using C/C++ for portability and performance, but without a huge engine runtime you'll have to drag along. There is no inherent size advantage of doing things in Javascript vs. cross-compiled to asm.js. For instance, three.js is 100kByte minified and compressed, that's in the same ballpark as the (admittedly simple) demos here: http://floooh.github.io/oryol/ Once you are over the stati…
Comment linking /oryol/
on “Voxel.css”Submitted How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers as a story · 178 points
HN discussionI get 165ms for my 8-bit homecomputer emulator which is 534KB compressed asm.js ( http://floooh.github.io/virtualkc/ ), and it seems the first call into the code takes another 500ms on Chrome (probably for JIT warmup). Bigger apps like UE4 or Unity demos are several times bigger and can take seconds to compile.
Comment linking /virtualkc/
on “WebAssembly: Mozilla Won”Submitted Tiny Emulators as a story · 168 points
HN discussionThe resident memory was 10MB in my windows machine when I ran this. A strong reason for me to use this would be in a low powered device. I want to write markdown in a tiny editor like this. I want to run multiple projects side by side and this is good for that. If I'm a beginner trying do dev on a machine lower than 4G of RAM. So many more examples come to my mind. I'm pretty sure there are more Also the immediate U…
Comment linking /sokol-html5/index.html
on “Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor”Submitted Handles are the better pointers (2018) as a story · 152 points
HN discussionIt is so sad to see this whole discussion. Because I usually think, HN is different, from the angry, uninformed mobs out "on the streets". I mean, I don't know much about low level graphic API's, I read about them, but I don't work with them directly. But apparently most of the people here don't know either! They basically seem to know that they like open standards (so do I) and that Vulkan is a open Standard and th…
Comment linking /2016/08/13/webgl-next.html
on “Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API”Submitted A new cycle-stepped 6502 CPU emulator as a story · 140 points
HN discussionBecause Vukkan is too low level for the web, and thus not a good impedence match. Here is a nice writeup: https://floooh.github.io/2016/08/13/webgl-next.html
Comment linking /2016/08/13/webgl-next.html
on “Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API”Submitted High Performance Z80 Emulation as a story · 120 points
HN discussionRelated reading re. Vulkan "What a WebGL2 successor could look like and why it can’t be WebVulkan" - https://floooh.github.io/2016/08/13/webgl-next.html See also the the author's sketch of a next-gen web graphics API on top of WebGL ( https://floooh.github.io/2016/10/24/altai.html ) which is (perhaps unsurprisingl) broadly similar to the sketch given the article (minus command queues, shader libraries, ...).
Comment linking /2016/10/24/altai.html
on “Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API”Submitted Modern C for C++ Peeps as a story · 102 points
HN discussionI tried something similar with a 4K C64 demo recently in my emulator, basically percent-encoding the program to run right into the URL instead of hosting it somewhere. It works, but only up to about 2.5 KBytes (good enough for 256 byte demos though). Let's see if HN accepts the URL: https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/c64.html?prg=AQgLCB4AnjIwN...
on “Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020”Submitted Modern C for C++ Peeps (2019) as a story · 94 points
HN discussionI have been thinking about this as well lately. For my app ( http://ngrid.io ) I'm using a custom built Entity-Component-System ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system ) based UI framework in Rust. In the ECS paradigm, everything is stored as struct-of-arrays as opposed to array-of-structs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AoS_and_SoA ) and as a result, your serialization becomes trivial. You are not c…
Comment linking /2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
on “SQLite as an Application File Format (2014)”Submitted Getting into way too much detail with the Z80 netlist simulation (2021) as a story · 82 points
HN discussion"C-like" code in C++ still has C++ semantics. "modern C++" is a disputed paradigm, but not necessarily how things should be done. When you write C++, but not "modern C++", that doesn't mean you are writing C. There are also modern features in C. https://floooh.github.io/2019/09/27/modern-c-for-cpp-peeps.h...
Comment linking /2019/09/27/modern-c-for-cpp-peeps.html
on “Why is Zig so cool?”Submitted A new cycle-stepped Z80 emulator as a story · 77 points
HN discussionYes, for instance this is mixed Zig/C project (the C part are the sokol headers for the platform-glue code): https://floooh.github.io/pacman.zig/pacman.html The Git repo is here: https://github.com/floooh/pacman.zig ...in this specific project, the Emscripten SDK is used for the link step (while compilation to WASM is handled by the Zig compiler, both for the Zig and C sources). The Emscripten linker enables the 'em…
Comment linking /pacman.zig/pacman.html
on “Porting my JavaScript game engine to C for no reason”Submitted Thoughts about a WebGL-Next (2016) as a story · 67 points
HN discussionThe tagging mechanism reminds me of generational indices like https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html , but I’m a bit out of my depth
Comment linking /2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
on “Memory Integrity Enforcement”Submitted Emscripten/HTML integration tips as a story · 66 points
HN discussion
