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by benjamincburns 3551 days ago
No clue how far you'd get, but I'd think you could come up with something interesting in that time frame. It's a lot more approachable than you might think.

I'm not well acquainted with Copy, so I don't know how long the bulk of the work took him. I'd suggest pinging him or Sebastian Macke (the guy behind jor1k) if you'd like to know more.

My understanding was that Sebastian chose OpenRISC in part because of the simplicity of the instruction set. I got the impression that this made the task a bit more approachable than x86 emulation, and gave him more hope for achieving a good emulation speed. And, in fact, it's quite snappy considering what it is. However I think he had to put a fair amount of effort into gcc and glibc debugging to really get it off the ground, and I know that he used to put a bunch of time into tuning the cores for each new version of asm.js, though I'm not sure how in flux it is these days.