Mirage is a (soon) bytecode emitter and interpreter designed to make it easier to write interpreted languages in Nim.
It is made for the Bali JavaScript engine that will be used for Ferus.
A lot of the bytecode instructions are shamelessly ripped off from Lua :^) \
It returns an IR object that has all the warnings generated by the IR generator alongside the IR source itself.
- Interpret bytecode
- Proper exception tracing
- Rudimentarily analyze "hot" code paths
Mirage is ~2800 LoC and does most of the bytecode generation and interpretation work already. We're probably never going to get as fast/efficient as LLVM which has millions of hours of manpower and research applied to it with millions of LoC.
It has plenty of bytecodes (there's too man
6197
y to list here!) and can do most things you want.
There's also some work going on to implement a fully functioning JIT compiler without any external libraries, in pure Nim!
- JIT compile the bytecode whenever necessary
- Be a real competitor to LLVM's JIT runtime
- Do the other things needed to write a programming language interpreter (tokenizer, parser, semantic rule applier, etc.)
- A lot of languages have very bizzare allowances on what they allow the programmer to do (take JavaScript's detached-from-reality "type" system for example)
- I'm lazy