Crabs All the Way Down – Running Rust on Logic Gates
Made an ARM Thumb CPU from scratch in a digital circuit simulator for fun and decided to push the joke a little further and run real stuff on it, like a Web server, a Scheme interpreter, a MIDI player, and a VT100 emulator. This is basically a how-did-we-get-here blogpost, it's my second one of this kind, I'd love any feedback you might have.
Crabs All the Way Down – Running Rust on Logic Gates launched on August 17, 2022 with 34 votes, #829 of 3,307 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 4 years on.
In plain words
Crabs All the Way Down documents a project where an ARM Thumb CPU was built from scratch using a digital circuit simulator, then pushed further by running real applications on it including a web server, Scheme interpreter, MIDI player, and VT100 emulator. The project serves as a technical deep-dive blog post exploring how these components were integrated together, aimed at developers interested in CPU design and low-level systems programming.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A journey in building an ARM CPU from scratch in a digital circuit simulator, and running Rust on it to interpret Scheme and serve Web pages.
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