GOTO is a vendor independent international software development conference with more that 90 top speaker and 1300 attendees. The conference cover topics such as .Net, Java, Open Source, Agile, Architecture and Design, Web, Cloud, New Languages and Processes

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Matt Godbolt, Low-level latency geek, DRW

Matt Godbolt

Biography: Matt Godbolt

Matt is a developer at trading firm DRW. He has worked at Google and before that over a decade in the games industry making PC and console games. He is fascinated by performance and created an online compiler visualizer, GCC Explorer, to help understand how C++ code ends up looking to the processor. When not performance tuning C++ code he enjoys writing emulators for 8-bit computers in Javascript.

GCC Explorer: http://gcc.godbolt.org/
Emulators: http://xania.org/miracle/miracle.html

Twitter: @mattgodbolt

Presentation: Emulating a 6502 system in Javascript

Time: Wednesday 16:05 - 16:55 / Location: Promenade Ballroom B & C

It's said you should never meet your heroes. They're wrong! This is the story of Matt meeting and getting to know one of his heroes: the 6502 microprocessor. It powered the Apple IIe, the Commodore 64 and PET, the Atari 2600 and the NES.

And more importantly - to Matt, anyway - it powered the BBC Micro; a British computer that revolutionized and democratized computing in the UK in the 1980s. Keeping this piece of computer history alive is important. And what better way than to write a full-system, cycle-accurate emulator of the BBC Micro ... in Javascript?

Matt did just that and in this talk he'll explain how. Along the way we'll encounter Javascript performance issues, what it means to be completely accurate (and why it matters), 1980s game protection systems and processor bugs. We get to play some cool games too!