From e9f2be4df1a61fb74d5aae0238f08a92379830c6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Marshall Lochbaum Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2021 18:14:12 -0500 Subject: Link to Asher's cxbqn VM video --- docs/implementation/vm.html | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'docs') 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 @@
(github) / BQN / implementation

The BQN virtual machine and runtime

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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 Javascript environment 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 embedded within other programming languages and interact with arrays or functions in those languages.

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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 Javascript environment 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 embedded within other programming languages and interact with arrays or functions in those languages.

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There's a short video introduction to the VM architecture thanks to Asher Mancinelli.

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.

Bytecode

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 LEB128 format; while it no longer has anything to do with bytes it's called a "bytecode" because this is shorter than "object code".

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