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ZetaVM

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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.