Bouncing Beholder, my winning JS1K entry (2012)
11 comments
·February 4, 2025jitl
This person is also the author of CodeMirror and ProseMirror, the best choices in my opinion for plain text editing and rich text editing respectively for the web platform
degun
Also, the author of "Eloquent JavaScript", the book from which I learned the language. Endless respect for Marijn.
mohsen1
I did a JS1K back in the day [1] such a fun concept!
I wonder these days if anyone is using multi-character emoji (don't know what do you call those exactly) to compress more data in 1024 "bytes"?
Since HackerNews does not allow emojis, here is a demo of what I mean:
gorkish
“Bytes” is not an arbitrary definition in the contest. Any use of an emoji takes 4 bytes. Some of these new combined ones can be 25+ bytes when accounting for zero width joiners, variant selectors, and modifiers. Technically you can pack nearly as much data as you like into a single legal Unicode glyph (think infinite zalgo text) if you just want to have the thought experiment.
Unicode is a nightmare, but I’m glad everyone agrees to share the same nightmare.
mohsen1
That explains it!
lifthrasiir
For the record, JS1024 [1] is a de-facto spiritual successor to JS1K nowadays.
wonger_
And sorta similar: https://js13kgames.com/
kookamamie
To those it was not obvious - the result of the entry is the top banner, a keyboard-controllable "game".
KingOfCoders
I wrote boot sector stuff (1k) on the Amiga (68k assembler). Today I wonder if I could have written a game (tech wise and skill wise).
> I've heard people wax poetic about programming old, limited-memory machines. I wouldn't know anything about those---at the time they were current, I was writing rudimentary number-guessing games in BASIC. But doing this competition entry gave me a taste of what they might be talking about.
One rather big difference here though, the limitation is on the size of the code, not the compiled binary. Most of the "optimizations" here have little to no effect on the code after it's compiled.
With older computers, instead of removing line breaks from the code, you're doing things like tweaking compiler flags to shrink the size.