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diff --git a/docs/implementation/vm.html b/docs/implementation/vm.html index 90aed858..76aa1002 100644 --- a/docs/implementation/vm.html +++ b/docs/implementation/vm.html @@ -5,7 +5,8 @@ </head> <div class="nav">(<a href="https://github.com/mlochbaum/BQN">github</a>) / <a href="../index.html">BQN</a> / <a href="index.html">implementation</a></div> <h1 id="the-bqn-virtual-machine-and-runtime"><a class="header" href="#the-bqn-virtual-machine-and-runtime">The BQN virtual machine and runtime</a></h1> -<p>BQN's self-hosted compiler and runtime mean that only a small amount of native code is needed to run BQN on any given platform. The <a href="https://github.com/mlochbaum/BQN/blob/master/implementation/../docs/bqn.js">Javascript environment</a> requires about 500 lines of Javascript code including system functions and performance improvements; probably around 250 would be required just to run the core language. This makes it fairly easy to port BQN to new platforms, allowing BQN to be <a href="../doc/embed.html">embedded</a> within other programming languages and interact with arrays or functions in those languages.</p> +<p>BQN's self-hosted compiler and runtime mean that only a small amount of native code is needed to run BQN on any given platform. The <a href="https://github.com/mlochbaum/BQN/blob/master/implementation/../docs/bqn.js">Javascript environment</a> requires about 600 lines of Javascript code including system functions and performance improvements; probably around 250 would be required just to run the core language. This makes it fairly easy to port BQN to new platforms, allowing BQN to be <a href="../doc/embed.html">embedded</a> within other programming languages and interact with arrays or functions in those languages.</p> +<p>There's a short <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxU5tZZ1gNc">video introduction</a> to the VM architecture thanks to Asher Mancinelli.</p> <p>The way data is represented is part of the VM implementation: it can use native arrays or a custom data structure, depending on what the language supports. An initial implementation will be very slow, but can be improved by replacing functions from the BQN-based runtime with native code. As the VM system can be hard to work with if you're not familiar with it, I advise you to contact me to discuss implementing a VM if you are interested.</p> <h2 id="bytecode"><a class="header" href="#bytecode">Bytecode</a></h2> <p>The BQN implementation here and dzaima/BQN share a stack-based object code format used to represent compiled code. This format is a list of numbers of unspecified precision (small precision will limit the length of list literals and number of locals per block, blocks, and constants). Previously it was encoded as bytes with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEB128">LEB128</a> format; while it no longer has anything to do with bytes it's called a "bytecode" because this is shorter than "object code".</p> |