ocornoc / metronome32

A Pendulum ISA virtual machine in C++14.

Metronome32 Version 1.0.0-alpha

(using SemVer 2.0.0)

Credit for the Pendulum 32-bit Instruction Set Architecture goes to Carlin James Vieri.

Metronome32 is made by Grayson Burton and is hosted at its Github repo.

What is Pendulum?

Pendulum is a 32-bit RISC Instruction Set Architecture that is completely, fully, 100% reversible. Any instruction executed can be reversed. This has advantages such as potentially "rewinding" a computer if a crash happens.

What is Metronome?

Metronome is a C++14 virtual machine made to execute Pendulum 32-bit bytecode. It also has a library for creating programs or instructions straight from C++, though this capability is intentionally barebones.

Beware!

Make sure to read through the Pendulum 32-bit Instruction Set Architecture specifications. It contains a lot of valuable information, not to mention that it's the sole source used in Metronome32's production.

One extremely easy mistake to make is to forget (or never know) that all branch and jump instructions must point to a CF (come from) instruction.

Metronome tries its best to stick to pure mandatory-only ISO C++14. Unfortunately, the use of std::uint32_t was practically inevitable. On top of that, Metronome assumes that the conversion of negative signed integers to unsigned numbers uses two's complement. These are thought to be relatively reasonable.

It uses SD-6 feature tests to optionally enable some attributes such as [[fallthrough]]. It does not test for [[maybe_unused]] support, instead presuming the compiler doesn't actually treat it as an error if it cannot be used.

Routine Testing

Currently, Metronome32's master branch is tested on a per pull request basis. It uses Travis CI to test on:

• Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04 LTS using GCC 5.4.0
• Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04 LTS using Clang/LLVM 7.0
• macOS 10.13 (Xcode 10.1) using Clang/LLVM 10.0