Quinix is an enjoyable excursion into virtual machines, assemblers, compilers, and operating systems.
First thing's first: let's design a CPU! The QPU is an idealized 32-bit RISC processor. It supports a more-or-less arbitrary number of peripherals, which interact with it via direct memory access. It supports hardware and software interrupts, including a timer and a generic software interrupt. It has a simple memory-mapping unit (or MMU), to assist in the implementation of virtual memory.
Now that we have in mind a simple arcitecture, let's build a virtual machine!
The Quinix virtual machine, or QVM, implements the QPU. It is implemented
in Typescript and runs both on node and in the browser. It models the memory of the system as a
Uint32Array. It supports just a few peripherals for now, including console input and output.
Writing binaries for the QVM is pain, so let's build an assembler!
The Quinix assembler, or QASM, is a Typescript assembler that can assemble binaries to run on the QVM. It supports a fairly minimal assembly language -- it is not a "macro assembler", but it does provide a few useful facilities, like labels for code locations and data, that make it somewhat easier to write binaries for our virtual machine.
Even writing assembly and assembling it with QASM can be tedious, but (for now) instead of improving the experience (for instance, by adding pseudo-instructions that are compiled to "native" instructions)... Let's build a compiler!
The Quinix "low-level language", or QLL, is something like a simplified C. To be honest, QLL is still pretty frustratingly low level, so we'll extend QLL as we go.
Finally, we have the tools we need... Let's build an operating system!
First, the install prerequisites and build the various parsers, executables, and runtimes:
$ npm i
$ ./build.shThe executables are located at ./bin/ and by default run via ts-node.
Due to the slow startup time, you may prefer to run the built executables, which
are located at ./build/bin/. To compile, assemble, and run a QLL program:
$ ./bin/qllc.ts -o file.qasm file.qll
$ ./bin/qasm.ts -o file.qbin file.qasm
$ ./bin/qvm.ts file.qbinRun tests:
$ npm tI wouldn't do that if I were you.