Zane Hambly
This computer was made for you and me
Kia ora, I'm Zane. Nau mai, haere mai. I'm a self-taught developer down in Aotearoa New Zealand who got curious about how computers actually work, the old ones especially, and never quite managed to stop pulling the thread.
Mostly I build compilers, emulators and language servers for machines nobody's bothered to write tooling for in decades. It's a lot of reading. No one has put a 1974 flight computer on Stack Overflow, so it all starts with primary sources: original manuals, faded specs, and every so often an email to whoever's sitting on the last surviving copy. One of those turned out to be a filing cabinet in Kansas, so I sent the email and waited for the renovations to finish.
I like giving old ideas somewhere new to live. My GPU compiler reports its crashes as 1960s mainframe dumps, because IBM had post-mortems sorted by 1964 and I reckon we quietly lost the plot somewhere after that.
LLMs are part of how software gets made now, and I use them too. I'd sooner be upfront about it than pretend otherwise. Here's how I use them, with a breakdown project by project if you're curious. :-)
Based in New Zealand. Student at Massey University.
Writing
Voyager FDS Emulator
The only emulator for the computer leaving the solar system. Built from original JPL documentation found in a university archive in Kansas, after NASA said no and a chain of links from a blog to Reddit to Hackaday led to a filing cabinet in Wichita. Now being put on a chip the width of a human hair.
Booth
An open-source GPU compiler written from scratch in C99. Takes CUDA, HIP and Triton and targets AMD, NVIDIA, Tenstorrent, or a plain CPU with no GPU at all. Tested by simulating nuclear reactors, because orthodox was never really the plan.
Ernest
A quantum compiler in C99 that ran a frame of DOOM on real IBM hardware, then learned to compile Fortran to quantum circuits. The whole field runs on Python, which is a strange choice for the mathematics that has been written in Fortran for sixty years.
HALMAT
Reconstructing the Space Shuttle's undocumented compiler intermediate language. All 180 opcodes across 9 classes, recovered by parsing 630 source files that nobody had touched since the 1990s. Built on Ron Burkey's Virtual AGC project.
MPB
Mainframe Package Bureau. A package manager for COBOL, HLASM, REXX, PL/I, and JCL, standing on fifty years of communal generosity that started with Arnold Casinghino mailing magnetic tapes through the post in 1975.
Projects
Compilers
- Booth GPU compiler in C99. CUDA, HIP, Triton in; AMD, NVIDIA, Tensix, CPU out.
- Karearea Fortran 77 compiler. 735/735 SLATEC files. PE-COFF and ELF.
- Wasabi WebAssembly to x86-64 AOT compiler.
- Plankalkul World's first high-level language, 1945. From Zuse's manuscripts.
- FLOW-MATIC Grace Hopper's 1955 business language. COBOL's ancestor.
Emulators
- Voyager FDS The computer leaving the solar system. The only emulator.
- Minuteman D-17B ICBM guidance computer.
- Setun-70 Soviet ternary computer.
- Viking Lander 1976 Mars mission.
Mainframe
- z390 Portable mainframe emulator. Core contributor.
- MPB Package manager for COBOL, HLASM, REXX, PL/I, JCL.
- zblas z/OS native BLAS in HLASM. z13+ vector SIMD.
- HLASM Strong Type VS Code LSP with type checking for registers and macros.
- HLASM for Notepad++ Column-aware syntax highlighting.
Language Servers
Scientific Computing
Quantum
Chip Design
- Takahe Universal hardware synthesis. Thirteen computing paradigms. SKY130.
- Voyager FDS on silicon The JPL flight computer. 58 gates. Fabrication-ready.
- Ruru Probabilistic processor. Distributions as a data type.
- Qsim 8-qubit quantum gate simulator on silicon.
Other
- HALMAT Space Shuttle compiler language, reconstructed.
- KW-26 ROMULUS Cold War teleprinter cipher. Reconstructed from declassified docs.
- Olint OCaml linter with auto-fix support.
- Plankalkul IDE VS Code extension with 2D grid editor.
- Kea Preemptive real-time OS for RISC-V.
Contact
Open to contract work and the occasional full-time problem worth solving.
Student at Massey University. Right to work in New Zealand, the UK, Australia, and the EU.