cardinal: A Rust repository from davehorner

Cardinal is a fork of Raven an independent re-implementation of the Uxn CPU and Varvara Ordinator.

The Uxn/Varvara ecosystem is a personal computing stack.

Cardinal is my personal stack for the Uxn/Varvara ecosystem.

For details on project origins, see Raven's project writeup.

The cardinal-uxn crate includes two implementations of the Uxn CPU:

The safe interpreter is a #[no_std] crate written in 100% safe Rust, with a single dependency (zerocopy). It is 10-20% faster than the reference implementation for CPU-heavy workloads (e.g. fib.tal, and mandelbrot.tal
The unsafe ("native") interpreter is written in aarch64 assembly (with Rust shims on either side), and runs 40-50% faster than the reference implementation

The native interpreter can be checked against the safe interpreter with fuzz testing:

cargo install cargo-fuzz # this only needs to be run once
cargo +nightly fuzz run --release fuzz-native

The Varvara implementation (cardinal-varvara) includes all peripherals, and has been tested on many of the flagship applications (Left, Orca, Noodle, Potato).

The repository includes two applications built on these libraries:

cardinal-cli is a command-line application to run console-based ROMs
cardinal-gui is a full-fledged GUI, which runs both as a native application and Raven on the web

The web demo is built with trunk, e.g.

cargo install --locked trunk # this only needs to be run once
cd cardinal-gui
cargo make serve-wasm

Use cargo make to build so that getrandom has the proper RUSTFLAGS.

technology from the past come to save the future from itself

July 2025 Changes

stdout and stderr callbacks
feat(audio): support dynamic sample rate selection between 48000 and 44100 Hz
refactor(deps): update to the latest and greatest 7/25 for all dependencies!
feat(cardinal-gui): add cardinal-demo binary with hot reload, inject, and rom cycling; cardinal-orcas binary added, wip.
wasm notice: cardinal-gui supports wasm. the others do not. PRs welcome.
/notes/01.debug basic debug start.
/notes/02.duplicate_mouse_device demonstrate custom Tracker Mouse device.
resolved 100+ clippy lints. wasm, ubuntu, windows, and macos all show green.
/notes/03.hidusb_controllers
/notes/04.sym_file_vector_labeling
/notes/05.cardinal-orcas
/notes/06.hardware_verification
/notes/07.xbox_controller_gilrs
/notes/08.e_midi

October 2025 Changes

cardinal-gui ctrl+c exits, f2 debugs, ctrl+alt+drag moves the window.
uxn-tal now supports protocol variables emu,debug,ontop,widget
linkedin redirect support uxntal uxntal:widget://https://lnkd.in/ec8ySaDV catclock and a +1 impression on linkedin. +1 impressions and likes appreciated.

uxntal:widget://https://wiki.xxiivv.com/etc/catclock.tal.txt

The repository includes ROMs compiled from the uxnemu reference implementation, which are © Devine Lu Linvega and released under the MIT license; see the roms/ subfolder for details.

we do not know what exactly will come of it

davehorner/cardinal