Write an Emulator in 24 hours 🥃

Welcome! VMAGI is a small emulator/interpreter my friend Matthew and I challenged each other to build in 24 hours. This includes both the implementation of the interpreter and creating your own ISA/3ac/IR for it that it will run on top of. If you want to see Matthew’s implementation, go to his repository.

My friend Ethan also joined us on this competition and completed his implementation. Funnily enough, I did it in Go, Matthew in Rust, Ethan in C++.

The goal within 24 hours was to write an interpreter that can reliably run a recursive version of fibonacci sequence, such that for any natural n, fib(n) returns the n’th element of the sequence.

This was an interesting challenge, as writing the machine itself, with all the instructions and logic around it was pretty simple. This includes required stuff like labels, jumps, conditionals, etc. The idea was to make it a workable interpreter for whatever you write.

Want to read more? See the whole story with the architecture, pitfalls, dragons(?), and needy-greedy technical details in the project’s repository!

-> Go to VMAGI