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kinow 7 hours ago

Cool idea, and agree with this sentence in the final paragraph

> It would be cool to make a similar visualization for RISC-V and compare it with ARM64.

Or even compare a subset of the instruction set to see what's missing on different archs.

Someone 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Where instructions end up in this visualization depends heavily on the way instructions get encoded.

Because of that, I don’t think this visualization is useful for comparing instruction sets.

As an extreme example, take the ARM64 instruction set, but change the ordering of bits. That would completely change the visualization.

You might get something halfway informative by searching for the most similar image across all possible bit permutations in the instruction set. 64! is large, but that may be doable because hill climbing will (somewhat) work.

I don’t think it is desired, though. A good visualization starts with the question what you want to visualize, and chances are this isn’t the best way to visualize that answer.