gospeccy

I used Go to write a concurrent ZX Spectrum emulator (https://github.com/remogatto/gospeccy). The language perfectly fits for this kind of task too.

"I've wondered whether a language more focussed on concurrency could make a multi-threaded emulator possible, but it looks like GoSpeccy isn't a particularly useful example of it." I think you are wrong. OK, it is true that the "emulation core" in GoSpeccy is not using any parallelism (the emulation core is fast enough, so what would be the reason for a parallel implementation there?), but it has a more concurrent design than (all?) other Spectrum emulators. The part where you are wrong is that all video and audio postprocessing in GoSpeccy is designed to run in parallel to the hardware emulation (Z80 CPU, ULA chip). As I explained in [https://github.com/remogatto/gospeccy/wiki/Architecture], there are not many things which actually run in parallel, because the emulator is fast enough (50 frames per second). But you can try the following:

Every month or so, somebody drops by the bsnes[3] forums asking why bsnes pegs one CPU core and leaves the others idle, instead of using each core equally. The answer, of course, is that a SNES has a number of different processing units all running at different speeds, and it's much more efficient to design the emulation core with coöperative multi-tasking[4] than with OS threads. Since bsnes is implemented in C++, I've wondered whether a language more focussed on concurrency could make a multi-threaded emulator possible, but it looks like GoSpeccy isn't a particularly useful example of it. From the "Architecture" page[5]: In consequence, the whole emulation core is basically just one goroutine [3]: http://byuu.org/bsnes/ [4]: Like, ridiculously more efficient, making it possible to sync millions of times per second. The system bsnes uses

Here's a link to the GoSpeccy architecture: https://github.com/remogatto/gospeccy/wiki/Architecture each of the modules communicate via Go channels