Imagesource: https://github.com/oconnor663/

An interesting one is the HN find of the week. A BLAKE3 implementation in 6502 assembly for Ben Eater's BE6502 breadboard computer.

Equally interesting were parts of the discussion about if and how such an implementation can be done for an 8-bit CPU. And always nice to see, when someone implements more complex algorithms despite the hardware limitations to addition, subtraction and 3 registers with 8bit word width.

But why not? In principle everything that is computable should be possible on an 8bit CPU. (Assuming enough banked memory ... and enough lifetime ...)

Jack O'Connor is responsible for this great experiment, and if you wonder what BLAKE3 actually is: a hash algorithm that is fast, secure and highly parallelizable. Not that the latter matters for the 6502 single core. 😛

Impatiently waiting for Ben Eater's next video? Then this will surely help you pass the time.