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    Next on lobste.rs: beating C with a custom massively parallel word-counting FPGA. There is no instruction set. It just dumps three integers onto the bus after scanning all of memory until it gets an address fault.

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      I dare you or the other lobsters here.

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        Well if you insist…

        Just pulled it out of my arse, but I haven’t done Verilog in a long time, though (and I didn’t do much of it in the first place), plus I don’t have any FPGA or anything to test it on (and I’m too lazy to set up a simulator), so it most likely contains very bad bugs.

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          I wish I could upvote you more than once. Cool!

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        Then, IBM’s scientists write their submission atom by atom with their logo under it the same way. Forwards it to Guinness to grab some meaningless record.

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        This is getting slightly tired… the only interesting post was the one about an experimental young language where they failed to ‘beat’ C but had an in depth discussion as to exactly why.

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          It would be more interesting if it were anything like a level playing field. It’s pretty pathetic when people compare unoptimised locale-aware GNU wc with their handcrafted ASCII-only heavily optimised SIMD implementations then act like it’s surprising that they won.

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          I love Eli’s conclusion:

          The conclusion? Well, there’s no real conclusion here, beyond that coding exercises like this are fun in any language :-)

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            I love this meme. It’s just so terrible.