When Curiosity Meets Go: TinyEMU-Go and the Art of Porting an Emulator with AI
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When Curiosity Meets Go: TinyEMU-Go and the Art of Porting an Emulator with AI

349 words
Categories:
Development Artificial Intelligence
Tags:
#go #ai #emulators #open-source #programming

A few days ago I came across an article that literally left me with my mouth open. It’s about TinyEMU-Go: a RISC-V emulator written entirely in Go, ported from C using Claude. And the best part: you can run a complete Linux with a single command.

The Command Line That Gave Me Envy

go run github.com/jtolio/tinyemu-go/temubox/example@2c8151233c2d

And boom, you have a complete Linux running. No special permissions, no containers, no weird dependencies. A pure static Go binary.

The Context: TinyEMU and Fabrice Bellard

TinyEMU is a RISC-V and x86 system emulator created by Fabrice Bellard - creator of FFmpeg, QEMU, and Google’s quantum computing project. TinyEMU is notable for being small and simple but complete - it even supports 128-bit RISC-V.

What JT Olio (the author of the Go port) did was ask Claude to port TinyEMU from C to Go. And Claude did. The entire CPU emulator, all VirtIO devices, including P9 filesystem support, and much of the SLIRP networking stack.

The AI Development Process

JT documents his experience working with Claude in multiple sessions, and he’s brutally honest:

The initial 80% was spectacular - Claude ported the CPU, wrote tests, got Linux to boot.

The final 20% was a nightmare - Linux was booting but not mounting initrd. The network stack was “incomplete.” The code looked like it was developed by “raccoons in a coat.”

Lessons Learned

JT shared reflections I find pure gold:

  • Clean the session and start with fresh context often
  • Explicitly repeat to create tickets for new problems
  • Occasionally take two steps back and rethink the approach
  • Any area with ambiguity will be exploited

And my favorite: “Don’t expect Claude to make cohesive APIs across sessions”.

JT ended up wrapping the Claude-generated code in a human-designed API because programming against a Claude-designed API felt “extremely uncanny-valley.”

Resources

A simple go run and you have Linux on your machine. Not bad for 2026.

This article arose from my curiosity about this project and JT Olio’s original article - a fascinating use case of AI in real development.

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