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Some time ago, I created a page for TurboVM. TurboVM is my stab at creating a virtual machine.

Where most virtual machines are created with a specific language in mind, TurboVM is language-agnostic. Its features and instruction set are modeled after traditional RISC machines. Hopefully, this will make TurboVM a suitable target for all kinds of languages.

TurboVM's instruction set is simple and easy to generate and parse in software. It also offers pretty good performance: the bytecode interpreter that ships with TurboVM runs about a factor 20 to 30 slower than the actual hardware. This is faster than, for example, OCaml's bytecode interpreter, which is generally considered very fast.

In addition to a bytecode interpreter, TurboVM ships with a compiler that translates TurboVM bytecode to C, which can be compiled to native machine code. This code runs about as fast as a comparable program written in C to begin with.

Finally, TurboVM includes an assembler and dissasembler which translate between human-readable assembly code and TurboVM bytecode.

Future plans for TurboVM include using some sort of structured file format for TurboVM programs and writing a Just-In-Time compiler. Currently, TurboVM generates and operates on raw bytecode files, but, eventually, there should probably be some metadata, to facilitate linking, for example. Also, currently, one must choose one of two modes: interpretation or compilation. Interpretation is most flexible and allows run-time generation of code, but yields much lower performance than ahead-of-time compilation. A JIT compiler would allow both run-time generation of code and good performance.

I've added a Games section to the Links/Software section of the site. In this new section, I link to some interesting games that can be played on free operating systems (such as Debian or FreeDOS.

I've added a Miscellaneous Software Page. It contains various small programs I have written over the years to customize my *nix environment and save me some work here and there. They are provided in the hope that they are useful to others and could also be said to serve as examples of the hidden strengths of Unix.

I have just released detach 0.2.2. This release adds a missing #include <stdlib.h> which was causing warnings during compilation, and includes a completer script for zsh.