MoarVM (short for Metamodel On A Runtime Virtual Machine) is a runtime built for the 6model object system. It is primarily aimed at running NQP and Rakudo Perl 6, but should be able to serve as a backend for any compilers built using the NQP compiler toolchain.

Building the VM itself takes just:

perl Configure.pl
make

(Or nmake on Windows). Currently it is known to build on Windows with MSVC, with gcc and clang on Linux & MacOS X. We're expanding this with time.

Type perl Configure.pl --help to see the configure-time options, as well as some descriptions of the make-time options/targets.

To run some NQP code, or tests, then:

cd nqp-cc
perl Configure.pl
make

Then run some NQP code with:

nqp nqp-moar-cc.nqp -e "say('Hello, MoarVM')"

To run some VM-centric tests, do:

make test

To run what is passing of the NQP test suite so far, do:

make nqptest

Very soon, you will be able to run some NQP code by doing:

cd nqp-cc
../moar nqp.moarvm -e 'say("Alive!")'

Note that at present, you need a working Parrot and NQP in order to run the cross-compiler. In the future, NQP will be self-hosting on MoarVM and that will not be needed. (NOTE: Actually NQP has been bootstrapped on top of MoarVM already, but the build system hasn't caught up yet.) In order to obtain these, you can replace the initial configure line with:

perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot --gen-nqp

Then you will need to have nqp-cc/install/bin in your PATH to safely build.

MoarVM is currently in development. It is capable of running much of the NQP test suite when it's cross-compiled, but does not yet host NQP, nor Rakudo Perl 6. We hope these to occur (conservatively) in 2013.

Unlike the JVM backend of NQP, the MoarVM repo is not currently planned to be integrated into the main NQP source repo http://github.com/perl6/nqp but instead will be pulled in by a future ConfigureMoarVM.pl (or similarly named) backend configure script in the NQP repo, similarly to how the original one automatically pulls in the Parrot VM and builds it from its repo.

Contributions by pull request are accepted. If you are interested in commit access so you can contribute more easily, drop by the #moarvm channel on freenode.org, or email [email protected] if you're averse to IRC.

See the LICENSE file in the root directory for information on the license of the source code in the MoarVM repository.