Pointers Gone Wild's resource offers insights, tutorials, and resources for C and C++ programmers. Readers can learn about pointer manipulation, memory management, and low-level programming techniques. With articles, tutorials, and code examples, Pointers Gone Wild provides  guidance and expertise for mastering the intricacies of pointer-based programming.

Pointers Gone Wild

A developer revived their custom stack-based bytecode VM (UVM) and built a Clang/LLVM IR backend for it using AI assistance. After Claude Opus wrote an LLVM IR parser in Rust in ~20 minutes, a working compiler was completed in days. The author then ported Doom to run on UVM using Claude Code in about an hour, optimizing it from ~27 FPS to ~86 FPS through palette lookup tables and improved frame buffer upsampling. The project is open source, and future plans include refactoring UVM to use a register-based instruction set for better performance.

Building a Clang Backend and Porting Doom to my Custom Bytecode VM

<p>Consuming clang’s textual LLVM IR instead of writing a real backend is a clever shortcut, but the version-sensitivity you hit is inherent — textual IR carries no stability guarantee across clang releases, so any parser is effectively pinned to one toolchain. The register-based ISA rewrite is where the real speedup is: on a bytecode interpreter most of the cost is dispatch, and stack juggling (dup/swap/pop) is pure overhead a register machine skips. That’s usually a bigger interpreter win than the frame-buffer memcpy you already landed.</p>
