Toothpick

I was taught assembler in my second year at school,
It's kind of like construction work
With a toothpick, for a tool
So when I made my senior year I threw my code away
And learned the way to program, that I still prefer today
       ~ The Eternal Flame

Toothpick is a toolkit for idiomaticly generating inspectable assembler bytecode from Clojure. It is intended for use in compilers and translators, but the truly adventurous could no doubt perform manual code generation and force the JVM to execute the result.

Toothpick is joined at the hip to Batbridge, which is the development target architecture for Toothpick.

Status

Toothpick has reached a 0.1.0 state, as the assembler itself is feature complete and Toothpick has successfully build and run code on bytecode enabled Batbridge simulators. Batbridge now uses Toothpick as an assembler backend for its test suite.

Soon to come is a JVM bytecode module, followed by some subset of Intel x86_64. These will be paired with matching simulators and tools for running the bytecode on "bare metal" so it may be some time.

Working Components

• toothpick.architecture provides a sane and probably stable interface for defining the instructions which constitute an instruction set.

• toothpick.architecture ISAs provide the information needed to build structured instruction representations into raw bytes executable by hardware or bytecode simulators.

• toothpick.assembler provides a full label based assembler as demonstrated below. At present however there is no good assembler support for compiling data segments or other common structures. There is also no support for variable length instruction encodings. These are both on the TODO list.

• toothpick.isa.batbridge provides a full definition of the Batbridge instruction set used as the target of my blog post series on processor design and implementation.

Usage

user> (require '[toothpick.assembler :refer [assemble]]])
nil
user> (require '[toothpick.isa.batbridge :as bb])
nil
user> (assemble bb/batbridge
       [[:add 0 29 30 15]
	    [:sub 1 30 29 15]])
(3223187471 3292456975)
user> (assemble bb/batbridge
       [:start
	    [:add 0 29 30 15]
		[:sub 1 30 29 15]
		:end
		[:add 31 30 29 :start]])
(3223187471 3292456975 3288262656)

License

Copyright © 2013 Reid "arrdem" McKenzie

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.