Mirage is a (soon) bytecode emitter and interpreter designed to make it easier to write interpreted languages in Nim.
It is made for the Bali JavaScript engine that will be used for Ferus.
A lot of the bytecode instructions are shamelessly ripped off from Lua :^) \
It returns an IR object that has all the warnings generated by the IR generator alongside the IR source itself.
- Interpret bytecode
- Proper exception tracing
- Rudimentarily analyze "hot" code paths
Mirage is ~2800 LoC and does most of the bytecode generation and interpretation work already. We're probably never going to get as fast/efficient as LLVM which has millions of hours of manpower and research applied to it with millions of LoC.
It has plenty of bytecodes (there's too many to list here!) and can do most things you want.
There's also some work going on to implement a fully functioning JIT compiler without any external libraries, in pure Nim!
- JIT compile the bytecode whenever necessary
- Be a real competitor to LLVM's JIT runtime
- Do the other things needed to write a programming language interpreter (tokenizer, parser, semantic rule applier, etc.)
- A lot of languages have very bizzare allowances on what they allow the programmer to do (take JavaScript's detached-from-reality "type" system for example)
- I'm lazy