This is hard to pull off in 12 weeks of full-time work for someone who is already a CS grad, absolutely impossible for anyone who doesn't already have that (or equivalent) experience.
Building a C compiler alone can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 20 years, depending on your acceptance criteria.
Why are we coding in so many different languages? Write the compiler in Haskell, why?
Also, why does this link to a half-finished attempt at solving the challenge, rather than the challenge itself? [1]
It's cute, but I say: why the lack of ambition? Make it: from the transistor to the LLM, in 13 weeks. Week 13 is for building a GPU, learning linear algebra, creating a large text corpus, implementing tensor flow, and training the model. Optionally an extra day for building a company around it, getting it funded and the IPO.
Or: it's rather unlikely someone untrained can build an OS from scratch in 3 weeks, let alone an OS plus an MMU, a driver, a file system and the basic command line.
tecleandor · 2h ago
Yeah, this is super weird. Just saying this is only one part of one section that "takes" 1 week:
Building an FPGA board -- Board design, FPGA BGA reflow, FPGA flash, a 50mhz clock, a USB JTAG port and flasher(no special hardware, a little cypress usb mcu to do jtag), a few leds, a reset button, a serial port(USB-FTDI) also powering via USB, an sd card, expansion connector(ide cable?), and an ethernet port. Optional, expansion board, host USB port, NTSC TV out, an ISA port, and PS/2 connector on the board to taunt you. We provide a toaster oven and a multimeter thermometer to do reflow.
You could spend weeks or months on board design. Or days just on reflow (or even more if you've never done any soldering).
foobahhhhh · 2h ago
2 word answer: George Hotz
fauria · 1h ago
In that same spirit, I can highly recommend the book "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" and its associated course "From NAND to Tetris": https://www.nand2tetris.org/
iammrpayments · 1h ago
This seems interest, but why do these kind of posts get a lot of likes here so fast?
When it is a book, it is understandable because you can assume a good portion of the upvoters actually read the book, but do people who upvote this kinda of “course” content even opened the link?
stebian_dable · 1h ago
Book recommendation on topic:
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software [Petzold]
skupig · 1h ago
Every single one of these sections sounds like it should take 3x as long
Building a C compiler alone can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 20 years, depending on your acceptance criteria.
Why are we coding in so many different languages? Write the compiler in Haskell, why?
Also, why does this link to a half-finished attempt at solving the challenge, rather than the challenge itself? [1]
[1]: https://github.com/geohot/fromthetransistor
Or: it's rather unlikely someone untrained can build an OS from scratch in 3 weeks, let alone an OS plus an MMU, a driver, a file system and the basic command line.
When it is a book, it is understandable because you can assume a good portion of the upvoters actually read the book, but do people who upvote this kinda of “course” content even opened the link?
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software [Petzold]