Work continues well. It has been a big shift from being a solo hobbyist developer to working on a real project as part of a (admittedly small) team but I was kind of prepared for the differences through listening to guys on here over the years and seem to be adjusting okay.
Since I'm working on something real now, I decided that I wanted a home project that was just purely for fun and had no real purpose. I've always been interested in compilers and virtual machines and have written a plethora of scripting languages, but never written a VM that supported dynamic allocation in a heap and a language that took advantage of it.
So that's what I'm doing. The following assembler script calculates the length required to concatenate two strings, allocates it, copies the data in the outputs the result plus the size of the new buffer, then frees it. The contents of the memory location labelled 'name' dictates which second string to use.
[source]
setax string0
strlen
push
setax name
get
movra
strlen
push
add
pop
incrx
alloc
movar
movad
setax store
put
setax string0
strlen
copy
push
setax store
get
push
add
pop
movrd
setax name
get
movra
strlen
incrx
copy
setax store
get
movra
outs
strlen
outn
setax end
outs
setax store
get
movra
free
exit
store: 0
name: string2
string0: "hello world from " 0b
string1: "paul" 10b 0b
string2: "eric" 10b 0b
end: 10b 0b
[/source]
Horrible, isn't it?
But it isn't really designed to be human written, this is just testing the VM works properly. It's really more designed to target a compiler at. I've decided though that this compiler is going to compile via text assembly like the above so I can check the output more easily, plus it looks cool.It's basically a three register VM - a value register and two address registers. Memory is just a contiguous block of chars that contains the program, then the stack, then the heap. Heap management is currently just a case of storing free blocks in a vector and merging adjacent free blocks together but more than ample for what I need.
So all good fun, largely because it is pointless and complicated.
