Amethyst VM

A virtual machine implementation from scratch, featuring a custom instruction set architecture and runtime environment.

Features

• Custom 32-bit instruction set architecture
• Register-based virtual machine
• Built-in assembler for creating bytecode
• Memory management with stack and heap
• Basic I/O operations
• Debugging and monitoring tools

Architecture

Registers

• 8 general-purpose registers (R0-R7)
• Stack pointer (SP)
• Program counter (PC)
• Flags register (FLAGS)

Memory Layout

• Code segment: Stores program instructions
• Data segment: Stores global variables
• Stack: Function calls and local variables
• Heap: Dynamic memory allocation

Instruction Set

• Arithmetic operations (ADD, SUB, MUL, DIV)
• Logical operations (AND, OR, XOR, NOT)
• Memory operations (LOAD, STORE)
• Control flow (JMP, JEQ, JNE, CALL, RET)
• I/O operations (PRINT, READ)
• System operations (HALT, NOP)

Building and Running

# Build the VM
make build

# Run a program
./amethyst-vm program.avm

# Assemble source code
./assembler program.asm -o program.avm

Example Programs

See the examples/ directory for sample programs that demonstrate the VM capabilities.

Development

• src/ - Source code for the VM implementation
• examples/ - Example programs
• tests/ - Test suite
• docs/ - Documentation

License

MIT License