PocketJS follows the same philosophy. On PSP and Vita, we integrate directly with the native graphics APIs instead of going through OpenGL.
Modern AI tooling makes this architecture practical, with ZERO abstraction tax and much more access to the hardware’s real potential. ⚡️
Under Linux, the graphics layer is typically handled by something called an X server. Indeed, many years ago, we thought that the defining characteristic of a user interface would be that it would be remote. Linux has generally followed this philosophy. You can often connect to a Linux box remotely and run desktop applications over the network. I think it proved much less useful than anticipated…
In any case…
A developer from Norway, Geir Isene, wrote his own X server… in assembly. That’s right. No compiler. No Rust. No C. Just assembly, with no dependencies. It is just one file containing assembly code. Assembly is one step removed from writing machine code directly.
Isene is using Claude Code to get it done.
It seems that he ended up with the same realization I had in the last year: this is the golden age for people who want to build their own software, for their own uses.
However, it is the first time I hear about such a non-trivial piece of software written… in assembly… with Claude Code. To be clear, there are large and complex software systems written in assembly… I just don’t think anyone thought of writing an X server in assembly before.
Some of my friends will object: “You can’t do that; you need the reliability of compilers and higher-level programming languages.” Maybe.
I think there are a great many unknowns today. Do programming languages matter the way they used to?