Show HN: Bedrock – An 8-bit computing system for running programs anywhere
15 comments
·July 10, 2025vincent-manis
This is the latest in a very honourable tradition. My first encounter with it was with Martin Richards's BCPL system in 1972. The compiler generated a hypothetical ISA called OCODE, from which backends generated pretty good native code for Titan-2 and System/360, among others. One of those backends generated INTCODE, which was an extremely reduced ISA, for which an interpreter could be easily written (I wrote one in Fortran). Richards also provided the BCPL compiler and runtime library in INTCODE, so you could quickly have BCPL running interpretively. Then you could use this interpretive version to bootstrap a native-code backend implementation. Put this all together, and you now have a very easy compiler port.
Wirth's Pascal-P compiler of 1974(?) used the same idea, also in aid of a highly portable compiler. I have never been able to find out whether this was an independent invention, or whether Wirth was influenced by Richards's work.
Of course, the JVM and CLR are descendents of this, but they build a very complex structure on the basic idea. Writing an implementation of one of these virtual machines is not for the faint of heart.
So I think Bedrock can be very useful as a compiler target, if nothing else. However, I must agree with some of the other commenters that the 64KiB address space makes it very much of a niche tool. Come up with a 32-bit variant that's not much more complicated, and I think you have a winner.
ripe
Regarding the 64kB limit: I notice that an implementation can provide the programmer an optional memory block of up to 64MB, IIUC:
https://benbridle.com/projects/bedrock/user-manual/memory-de...
treetalker
I'm not steeped in computer science, so please pardon me if the following are dumb questions.
> Programs written for Bedrock can run on any computer system, so long as a Bedrock emulator has been implemented for that system.
Isn't that true of any program? As long as the language that the program is written in is implemented on the system, any (valid?) program in that language will run on that system?
Wowfunhappy
Based on the OP, I think the idea is that it's very easy to port this emulator to a new system.
great_psy
I have not delved to deep in the code, but is there any functional differences it has over Java other than the size ?
Presumably Java would also be pretty tiny if we wrote it in bytecode instead of higher lever Java.
teraflop
The Java bytecode instruction set actually has a quite complicated specification: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se8/html/
Which means implementations also have to be correspondingly complicated. You have to handle quite a few different primitive data types each with their own opcodes, class hierarchies, method resolution (including overloading), a "constant pool" per class, garbage collection, exception handling, ...
I would expect a minimal JVM that can actually run real code generated by a Java compiler to require at least 10x as much code as a minimal Bedrock VM, and probably closer to 100x.
willguest
I made a bedrock onion of death: https://paste.pictures/FgqbwUTCY8.png
Couldn't have done it without you
nxobject
This is fantastic! As someone who's used PICO-8 in after-school STEM enrichment classes (and has evaluated uxn), one of the frustrations that my students have always had is easy I/O and persisting state -- for saving/loading game progress and settings, of course. The clipboard and registry devices seem like a good fit.
I hope you stick with this!
behrlich
> I designed Bedrock to make it easier to maintain programs as a solo developer.
Can you say more? I really love this idea but can’t think of any practical use case with 65k of memory. What programs are you now more easily maintaining with Bedrock? To what end?
durakot
Check out Uxn for some "practical" use cases: https://github.com/hundredrabbits/awesome-uxn
kosmavision
For people curious about the differences between this and Uxn (as I was): https://benbridle.com/articles/bedrock-differences-from-uxn....
untech
Love it, I think it's very cool! I am not sold on its "everlasting" promise yet, but as an addition to the family of "fantasy" platforms seems very solid.
tines
Why 8 bit?
lastdong
The demos are surprisingly fun!
szczepu
[dead]
Hey everyone, this is my latest project.
Bedrock is a lightweight program runtime: programs assemble down to a few kilobytes of bytecode that can run on any computer, console, or handheld. The runtime is tiny, it can be implemented from scratch in a few hours, and the I/O devices for accessing the keyboard, screen, networking, etc. can be added on as needed.
I designed Bedrock to make it easier to maintain programs as a solo developer. It's deeply inspired by Uxn and PICO-8, but it makes significant departures from Uxn to provide more capabilities to programs and to be easier to implement.
Let me know if you try it out or have any questions.