VM2

From Mindstab Wiki

VM2 never happened, got forgotten and then a year or two later I wrote fast-lang. Which really wasn't a more fully feature vm-proto, it was actually a simpler, but faster version. Here's the original page:

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VM2 is my second attempt at writing a small virtual machine. The first attempt was VM-proto. These attempts are mostly proof of concept/knownledge. Just a way of applying what I've learned and learnign some more.

The generalized goal of VM2 is to be better than VM-proto. By better I mean faster and more featured.

• Faster

  My speed test uses primes:

  Prime number benchmarks
  Benchmark machine: Linux inferno 2.6.10-5-386 #1 Tue Apr 5 12:12:40 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
  
  (1/36) C results:
  Compile [gcc]:          0.31 seconds
  Execute:                0.05 seconds
  
  (13/36) C# (Mono) results:
  Compile [mcs]:          0.79 seconds
  Execute [mono]:         0.48 seconds
  
  (17/36) PERL results:
  Execute [perl]:         1.11 seconds
  
  (19/36) Python results:
  Execute [python]:       2.88 seconds
  
  ...
  
  haplo@inferno:~/src/my/vm-proto $ time ./vm primes.vmo > /dev/null
  
  real    0m1.158s
  

  As you can see VM-proto was on par with interpreted languages like perl even though it is compiled to byte code. I believe I can do much better than that with VM2

• Features

  I ran into design problems pretty quickly with VM-proto. Here is a short list of features I'd like VM2 to have:

  • Variables: non register data storage :)
  • Proper dynamic naming tables so that we can have...
  • Mutli object programs (so we can actually have object libraries)

  If I can accomplish all that I'll be pretty pleased. More experimental features I might try to add but will probably be deferred to VM3 or later would be

  • Context switching and multi-threadedness