The Virtual Machine

Idio is implemented through a stack-based register-based virtual machine that uses abstracted opcodes suited to the high level nature of the language. We’re not quite at the level of MOV, JMP and RET from a real-world hardware computer’s assembly language but the transformation from Idio’s high-level forms may feel like it.

The Idio virtual machine is of our own invention (by which I mean it is clearly and obviously derived from LiSP [Que94]). It is not targeting the JVM or any other pre-existing virtual machine. If we did then I’m not sure we’d learn anything about virtual machines and it creates another dependency when installing Idio on a clean machine.

So long as we can totter along well enough, I think we’re good to go. We can always want to go faster and more efficiently. There will always be some who actively want to target some other virtual machine or even have the whole engine translated into C, say, and compiled directly.

If you follow through LiSP there are two clear and dramatic steps forward:

1. we stop looking variables up

2. we transform the high-level language for byte compilation

Clearly the second is at hand. The first is, arguably, more dramatic.

• Variable Lookups
  • Modules
  • Forward Lookups
  • Pre-Compiled Modules
  • Forward Lookups II
  • Review
• Register Machine
  • Opcodes
  • Program Counter
  • Registers
  • Dynamic Registers
  • Dynamic Environment
  • Thread Value
  • Continuation Values
• Debugging
  • State
  • Dynamic Views
  • Disassembly
  • Performance Data

Last built at 2024-12-21T07:11:06Z+0000 from 463152b (dev)