(Go) Lox Bytecode VM (Crafting Interpreters)

This is an implementation of The Lox Programming Language in Go.

This builds upon my previous work:

• leonardinius/golox - Golang Lox interpreter.
• leonardinius/clox - C language bytecode VM, following the "Crafting Interpreters" book closely.

This repository is a re-implementation of what I learned from the clox VM bytecode using Go.

golox-vm is not a direct copy of clox, but rather a reimplementation using Go syntax. The main effort went into dealing with Go's limitations like cyclic dependencies, garbage collection, memory management, NaN boxing, and unsafe pointers.

I've also learned a thing or two about (removed experiment) CGO (Calling Go from C) with C.alloc/C.free memory management, etc.

What's Included?

• golox-vm bytecode
• Mark & sweep garbage collector with NaN boxed values
• LOX features: functions, OOP, etc.
• Acceptance tests: Copied from munificent/craftinginterpreters:test/
• Benchmarks
• pprof profiler support: GLOX_PPROF=0/1,GLOX_PPROF_CPU=0/1,GLOX_PPROF_MEM=0/1

Completeness & Speed

• make test_e2e passes all original test suites.
• make bench executes basic tests. Currently, the speed is better than leonardinius/golox but not as fast as leonardinius/clox.
• More detailed analysis is needed.

How to Run Locally

λ make 
Usage: make <target>
 Default
        help                  Display this help
 Build/Run
        all                   ALL, builds the world
        clean                 Clean-up build artifacts
        test                  Runs all tests
        test_e2e              Runs all e2e tests
        bench                 Runs all benchmarks
        lint                  Runs all linters
        release               Build RELEASE (debug off)
        debug                 Build DEBUG (debug on)
        run                   Runs golox-vm. Use 'make ARGS="script.lox" run' to pass arguments
        rund                  Runs goloxd-vm. Use 'make ARGS="script.lox" run' to pass arguments