Hello World — In Three Days!
Three days to get Hello World running.
Not because the code was hard — it’s one line of ZX Basic, or a handful of C, but because the *tools* were hard.
New IDE on a new Windows PC. GitBash vs PowerShell fighting over which GCC to use. Vitis installer hanging silently on Ubuntu because `libncurses` wasn’t in the prerequisites list. An AI agent spinning in circles looking for a build output that was right there, just in the wrong directory.
Hello World isn’t a rite of passage you do once. It’s a tool. Every new compiler, every new target, every new IDE — you prove the chain before you write the real code. Debug one thing at a time.
This one ran on a Windows PC, a Linux PC, two different embedded Linux targets with different ARM cores, and CI. Hence three days. … More Hello World — In Three Days!
Glorified Plumbing 