ZetaVM

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, 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 and Basic Usage

# 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

# To run programs, pass the path to a source file to zeta, for example:
./zeta benchmarks/fib29.pls

# 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 will 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

• 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 talk about ZetaVM given at PolyConf in July 2017 is available.

For more information, see the documentation in the docs directory:

• Overview and Roadmap

• Design and Guiding Principles of ZetaVM

• Packages included with ZetaVM

• Creating your own Language with ZetaVM

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.