So, of course you can, I've written every application that now exist on Uxn, in C prior to porting them. There was a moment when I was quite convinced that C was a good candidate for what we wanted to do.
For example, equivalent programs:
C version: https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/orca-toy/tree/main/item/etc/orca....
Uxn version: https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/orca-toy/tree/main/item/src/orca....
Compiling Orca C(SDL on Pi), is about 10x~ slower, more battery hungry, (and also for some reason, very upsetting to ASAN), than building C(libdraw on Pi), which is itself about 50x slower and battery hungry than building the Uxn version.
I can compile little C cli tools on the Pi just fine, that's not the issue, building x11 or SDL applications with debug flags is another story. I much rather be assembling uxn roms in this case. I wrote a few cc65 compiled applications prior to building uxn as an alternative, but that was a non-starter on ARM.
If you can limit yourself within low resolution, small color pallete, direct use of simple graphics API, basicalyl target the computing experience of when computers had 50mhz CPU. Then its possible to make things blazing fast even on a Pi, using ANY language? I'm sure on a "well ackshually" level there is some difference in how the CPU executes things but practically its like milliseconds and milliamps not anything perceptable.
WIth C Im not sure if I know what im talking about here (i've compiled hello world with gcc myself, otherwise i know how to use Make even though i dont understand it but ive also never needed to understand it, but seems like every project uses makefiles or something like it...) but isn't compiling SDL or libdraw a 1 time thing the very first time you build the program, then each time you make a change to orca.c it compiles pretty quick (until 'make clean')? you dont include the time to re-compile uxn emulator when you say uxn is 50x faster? What is ASAN?
