ZetaVM
Please note that ZetaVM is currently at the early prototype stage. As such,
it is incomplete and breaking changes may happen often.
Requirements:
- GNU Make
- GCC 5.4+ (linux) or clang (OSX), or cygwin (Windows)
- Optional: autoconf and pkg-config, if needing to edit the configure file
- Optional: sdl2, if wanting to use audio and graphics capabilities
- Optional: Python 2 is needed to run the benchmark.py script
Installation
# Clone this repository
git clone git@github.com:maximecb/zetavm.git
# Run the configure script and compile zetavm
# Note: run configure with `--with-sdl2` to build audio and graphics support
cd zetavm
./configure
make -j4
# Optionally run tests to check that everything works properly
make test
Basic Usage
# To run programs, pass the path to a source file to zeta, for example:
./zeta benchmarks/fib.pls -- 29
# To start up the Plush REPL (interactive shell),
# you can run the Plush language package as a program:
./zeta lang/plush/0
About ZetaVM
ZetaVM is a Virtual machine and JIT compiler for dynamic programming languages.
It implements a basic core runtime environment on top of which programming
dynamic languages can be implemented with relatively little effort.
Features of the VM include:
-
Built-in support for dynamic typing
-
Garbage collection
-
JIT compilation
-
Dynamically growable objects (JS-like)
-
Dynamically-typed arrays (JS/Python-like)
-
Integer and floating-point arithmetic
-
Immutable UTF-8 strings
-
Text-based code and data storage format (JSON-like)
-
First-class stack-based bytecode (code is data)
-
Built-in graphical and audio libraries
-
Coming soon: built-in package manager
Zeta image files (.zim) are JSON-like, human-readable text files containing
objects, data and bytecodes to be executed by ZetaVM.
They are intended to serve as a compilation target, and may contain
executable programs, or libraries/packages.
More Information
A recording of a talk about ZetaVM given at PolyConf 2017 is available.
For more information, see the documentation in the docs directory:
There are also a few blog post about Zeta and its design.
For additional questions and clarifications, open a GitHub issue and tag it as a question, or join the ZetaVM Gitter chat.