How to Build a Virtual Machine [video]

Terence does such a great job explaining and teaching. It is very easy to forgot how everything we hack actually gets executed. We live in a high level world which wouldn't be possible without a bunch of smart people who figure these details out for us.

For those that want to learn about the whole stack "Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" is quite good.

http://www.nand2tetris.org/

people interested in bytecode should also try to find this book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_in_Small_Pieces

The author progressively derive a VM from a naive interpreter (after many steps)

As USF CS Alum, its always refreshing to see Parr doing what he does best. His style and approach to learning was thoughtful and enlightening.

One day in class, my assignment source was corrupted and I had to reassemble it from compiled byte code files. He made an impromptu lecture about it for the class to learn about. He didnt shame me but wanted everyone to be enriched from best practices.

Recently I was bored enough to code a disassembler for a VM with basically unknown (to the public) internals, that almost nobody has heard of.

Next I'll probably fork it to remove all the debugging-specific opcodes and recompile with the official assembler.

For some reason it really bothers me that stack[0] is never used in this implementation.