CppCon 2016: Jason Turner “Rich Code for Tiny Computers: A Simple Commodore 64 Game in C++17”

Caption notes

At CppCon 2016, Jason Turner uses a small Pong game for the Commodore 64 to discuss modern C++ expression, compile-time work and runtime overhead on a tiny machine. His experimental toolchain generates x86 assembly before translating it to 6502 code, and the talk covers objects, lifetimes, palettes and resource generation. An important boundary is his explicit qualification that one const optimization occurred only with the compiler and standard-library combination he had found. Questions continue to probe whether optimization will persist. This guide does not verify the on-screen code, hardware demonstration, instruction counts or zero-overhead measurements; a particular demonstration is not a language-level performance guarantee for every build.