Quinix is an attempt to learn more about operating systems, and revisit some old favorite topics like compilers and virtual machines, via a somewhat circuitous route:
Quinix is an experiment, so be sure to read the disclaimer!
While Quinix is very much a work in progress, nevertheless progress has been made. So far there’s a virtual machine (with interactive debugger), an assembler, a compiler, and a minimal runtime including a simple list-based memory allocator.
The Quinix virtual machine and interactive debugger.
There’s also a minimal VS Code extension implementing syntax highlighting for both the assembly language and the higher-level language.
Syntax highlighting in VS Code for QASM – the Quinix assembly language.
QLL – the Quinix low-level higher-level language.
In the interest of actually publishing something I’ve decided to continue development of Quinix “in public”, so to speak. So follow along!
With output taken care of, one naturally turns to input. But first, let’s take a closer look at our output peripheral, and our approach to peripherals generally, to understand how well it will support asynchronous behaviour like input.
Read more »We can finally get more than a single number out of our machine – we can print (short) strings, too. But getting strings into our machine is a pain. Let’s improve our assembler!
Read more »With an assembler in hand we can write reasonable programs for our virtual machine. Fun! But sadly, our programs are stuck inside of our machine, unable to do much in the way of output (and even less in the way of input). Let’s fix that!
Read more »