Very cool! Clearly I had a long way to go with mine to get it under the IOCCC requirements :) Though my goal was specifically Pokémon... curious how much more you would need to be able to run that.
heh, good point! Most of the older ones are using GameBoy-Online[0] instead, since that was the GB Studio default for a while. But I think everything since GBStudio 3 should be binjgb.
This is using my gameboy emulator, binjgb[0], on the website! (well one of my gameboy emulators, heh [1][2]) It's been used as the emulator for GB Studio for a little while now, but I don't know how often people embed it in their websites, so it's really cool to see.
This was brought up for the last one of these I made, but the code here is c++ so wouldn't be allowed. I don't use a lot of c++ features, but it might be hard to keep the code size small without them.
However there were a lot of discussions that were not in those meetings and were in smaller groups or held in GitHub issues or PRs. Most of these were in https://github.com/webassembly/design.
I'm probably the wrong person to ask, to be honest. I was around for a lot of the design of Wasm, but wasn't really involved at that level.
That said, in my opinion the ideal set of opcodes really depends on your goal. There were many goals For Wasm, but I think there was a focus on keeping it small and simple. Originally it was AST-based, but it was changed to a stack machine to reduce size. It was also designed to be AoT or JIT compiled, so the opcode layout is not particularly friendly to hardware decoding or interpreters (although people have made some very high quality Wasm interpreters).
And of course there were a lot of discussions and disagreements about the best way forward: AST vs. register VM vs. stack machine. Structured control flow vs. goto. How to handle unreachable code. How to store integer literals (LEB vs. prefix byte). What the text format should look like (sexprs vs. ...?) etc.
Not sure, I think it should! Would be really cool if someone tried it out. I'm a little worried I didn't implement some necessary instructions/hardware features so the game isn't actually winnable :-}
JVM is a great choice! You might also want to check out WebAssembly too (full disclosure: I used to work on wasm). There aren't too many opcodes, and a lot of them are relatively simple math operations.