CVML : Cat (or Concatenative) Virtual Machine Language
Christopher Diggins
complete, but for anyone really interested it might be a fun project
to follow along. The source can be checked out using SVN at
http://code.google.com/p/cvml/source/checkout or browsed at
http://code.google.com/p/cvml/source/browse/#svn/trunk (sorry but the
Google code viewer mutilates indentation)
This is a C++ project which I am compiling on both VC++ 2008 and GCC
3.4 under Cygwin.
CVML is an attempt at constructing an optimizing bytecode compiler for
a high-level language. The bytecode is a single-stack, functional
language based on Cat. The high-level language I use is called Heron,
and resembles Scala or ECMAScript 4 (essentially Java with a Pascal
twist). What the project does is convert from Heron into CVML (and
Java for comparison purposes). It then applies multiple optimizations
to the CVML bytecode, focusing primarily on reducing the size.
The interesting observation about this kind of bytecode (which I guess
could be called a concatenative bytecode according to the definitions
we have discussed in the group earlier), is that we can inline code at
call-sites (e.g. apply or call functions) without having to modify the
code being inlined.
Anyway the project is still under development: I am still missing lots
of tests and the actualy virtual machine itself, but you can still
play around with it, and might find the source code amusing.
Christopher