shawnnapora

This is pretty neat! Is there a way to have arbitrary input for the number of cycles and actually emit the answer? It looks like the answer is being read in software from a register, if I understand the .vcd output correctly.

A virtual machine is interesting to me when it corresponds to a hardware target, since then that isn't hiding complexity in software. I suppose, though, that an enterprising individual could make a custom hardware target that implements an overly complex, overspecific instruction set and win at hardware golf but I'd honestly be very impressed.

The positive part about virtual machines in general would be the ease of debugging and sharing/validating answers, though.

A lot relative to what? :) These 134 bytes will emit an answer without requiring a kernel or a runtime, either of which generally will be orders of magnitude larger than 134 bytes alone.