These emulators already exist in basically every language, so why do anything? The point is the journey, which doesn’t need to be the shortest, most optimal path possible.
I’m saying it’s not optimal for learning the language, not that it’s not worth doing. I’ve worked on 3 different emulators for fun over the last few years, my first in rust. It was a bad experience for learning rust because I was following prior art which relied heavily on shared data structures and lots of poking randomly at blocks of RAM, a very natural way to think when you’re engrossed in the mechanics of an 8-bit CPU.
I had a better time writing a raycaster and later a path tracer, although by then I had learned to avoid dealing with the borrow checker…
