Collecting ISA Manuals

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Going forward, I will be collecting and publishing all the manuals that I can get my hands on for various historical and contemporary instruction set architectures. The archive can be found here, and it will be updated regularly. It’s not limited to ‘real’ ISAs; for example, I’ve included SPIR-V and WebAssembly because they’re both major compilation targets that already have loads of compiled artifacts in the wild.

I hope this’ll be a useful resource for people working on compilers, assemblers, emulators, and other such tooling. It should also help combat the disappearance of ISA manuals; while building this archive, I found that far too many old or niche ISAs (10+ by my count) no longer have manuals available anywhere online! For those, short of a lucky break like someone having a local backup, the full ISA details are essentially lost to time. It’s a damn shame for that to happen in the age of the Internet. So, if you happen to have a manual that isn’t in the archive, please email me!

Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve decided to start the process of migrating my projects from GitHub to Codeberg. I’ve also applied to become a paying Codeberg member, to do my part to keep the platform sustainable. I’ve already migrated my personal repositories and some Vezel repositories. I’m still working out the details for the remaining Vezel repositories, particularly in regards to CI; I’m strongly considering just renting a dedicated server and self-hosting it. I’ll still have to stick around on GitHub to work on Zig and LLVM of course, but I’m moving all the repositories that I control off the platform.

The final straw that made me pull the trigger was GitHub’s decision to let people use AI to fill out issues. The signs were obviously there before, what with the Copilot buttons appearing everywhere in the GitHub UI, the GitHub Changelog being flooded with AI features, and barely any much-needed improvements or fixes being made to the core platform anymore. But now we at least have crystal clear confirmation of what GitHub is going to become over the next few years; it’s already annoying having to deal with people who dump LLM slop on issue trackers, and now GitHub wants to make that a first-class feature of the platform itself. No thanks.

I’m optimistic that Codeberg, being a non-profit, can avoid enshittification - which appears to be inevitable for profit-driven platforms.

Alex Rønne Petersen

Collecting ISA Manuals

Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg