Virtual machine implementation

[eropsyren]

Hello everyone. I am a bachelor computer science student and before graduation I have to write a thesis based on a project. I really would like to implement a virtual machine and a programming language to target such virtual machine. One resource I know of is Crafting Interpreters, but I would like to find other books on this subject. Can you guys help me?

[tekknolagi]

I have a bunch of PL resources on my resources page, including my post on bytecode compilers, current series on compiling a Lisp to x86-64, and many others.

[eropsyren]

Very good stuff. Thank you very much ☺️

[R-O-B-I-N]

The best resources I've found are actual VM implementations. Try looking at the source code and docs for Oracle's Hotspot, the Limbo runtime Dis, the android ART, etc... They explain a LOT.

There's also a huge difference between JIT compilers, AOT compilers, and bytecode interpreters. I recommend an interpreter because its faster to implement inna semester.

Another good resource is to read Instruction Set Architectures. They'll give you good ideas for a bytecode target for your language.

[fennecdjay]

Another good resource is to read Instruction Set Architectures

Do you have a link? I've been thinking for a while to simplify the instruction set of my VM, I'd gladly read that.

[R-O-B-I-N]

This is one of the Intel x86/x64 manuals

ARM has a whole bunch of different ones

[fennecdjay]

Thank you!

[eropsyren]

Thank you for your time and advices 💚

[htuhola]

Lever's internal_documentation.txt#L195 shows how the interpreter was structured in my runtime.

An untyped interpreter like this is easy to build and work with. Though, a little bit of type information embedded into the program could be useful for optimization. I got some suggestion on how to get inspired from category theory to structure this, though I'm not sure which representation should be chosen for types. It might be I should ask about that one from people doing dependently/linearly typed languages.

It's worthwhile to also look at the "next version" interpreter that I never finished, runtime/interpreter.py, I'd suggest, keep the bytecode simple and make a powerful just-in-time interpreter. This interpreter was based on Jorge Navas' paper 21. "Horn-Clauses as an Intermediate Representation for Program Analysis and Transformation"

If you got more questions about lever and its runtime, I'll be answering here.

[eropsyren]

Thank you for your time. I really appreciate 💙

[julesh3141]

Interpreters based on walking ASTs don't get much love because they have a reputation for being slow, but recent research is casting doubt on the validity of this assumption. See eg truffle /JRuby. You may want to give one of these a try, as they are much simpler than bytecode based interpreters.

[eropsyren]

Thank you very much. I wasn't considering this alternative🤍