Running a Unix-like OS on a home-built CPU with a home-built C compiler (2020)
> CPU experiment is a little famous exercise held in the winter of the junior year in my department, the Department of Information Science at the University of Tokyo. In the experiment, students are divided into groups of four or five students. Each group designs an own CPU architecture, implements it on an FPGA, builds an OCaml subset compiler for that CPU, and then runs a given ray-tracing program on the CPU. Typically, one or two people are responsible for each of the CPU, FPU, CPU simulator and compiler.I have seen professional programmers fail projects much easier than this. How does the University of Tokyo manage to teach their students so well, or do they show up to it better trained/motivated than the average Western student?