Notice

Tern has been superseded by BTM, but the previous README remains below

Tern

This is a poorly implemented VM with a MIPS-style architecture based on balanced ternary arithmetic. It operates on 6-trit trytes, 12-trit halfwords, and 24-trit words, and has built-in support for text encoded in UTF-6t, the ternary analogue of UTF-8. This project is not finished, as the intention is to eventually replace it with a much better design, informed by the many lessons I've learned along the way about Rust programming and VM/CPU design.

Improvements for the next version

• Use as little unsafe code as possible
• Address trytes instead of trits
• Operate on trytes as 16-bit integers instead of individual trits as bytes
• Encode every instruction as a single word
• Match the classic MIPS instruction set more closely
• Add a div instruction for integer division and modulus
• Use a real parser for the assembler instead of a pile of regexes
• Implement UTF-6t functionality in assembly code instead of opaque syscalls

Usage

There are a few binaries in the project, but the primary one is run, which allows you to execute the assembly files in the programs directory: cargo run --bin run programs/hash.tasm