@lanodan @chjara@mk.absturztau.be @mia Well, a lot a video games still use custom bytecode for scripted events among other things. It wouldn't surprise me if some didn't bother writing a language or compiler for said bytecode and just directly wrote it in hex.

@xianc78 @chjara @mia Nah, you can write a standalone compiler with barely any assembly and definitely no binary.
I've seen some where it's just an opcode table.

I've yet to see a program where it's "source" is pure binary, including for firmware stuff.

@lanodan @chjara@mk.absturztau.be @mia No. I mean that they are too lazy to write a compiler because they don't want to bother with parsing, coming up with grammars, etc. And there is probably no need to since if you made the bytecode interpreter, you probably have the custom opcode memorized.

@xianc78 @chjara @mia Writing a forth or lisp compiler is rather easy and pretty sure you could end up writing some sort of assembler by accident because you just want to avoid repeating yourself.

We are terrible at writing down a bunch of numbers and checking them afterwards. Validating a checksum manually is a mess, while if you would transform it to a string of words or even syllables it suddenly becomes much easier (hint hint matrix and OMEMO).