derickeddington / vifne Goto Github PK

An emulator of a novel computer architecture modeled after the Fresh Breeze design, intended for exploring programming such a computer with its unusual chunk memory management and multi-core synchronization, that enables amazing degrees of modularity, and even compositionality, of libraries and programs that are very parallel. Vifne means fresh in the Lojban language.

The purpose is only to achieve the simplest implementation of an ISA (instruction set architecture) and truly-parallel multiprocessing that captures the essential nature of the Fresh Breeze design. It does not emulate many aspects of a real hardware machine, and it differs from the Fresh Breeze design, as described in the freely-available papers, in some ways.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the time to complete it after encountering a problem with reference cycles and streams, but the emulator and assembler are fairly built-out and do work. I did record notes about the problem, and the Fresh Breeze papers do mention a solution for avoiding the problem which would be cool to research and incorporate.

Running the emulator and the tests requires my modified version of Ikarus Scheme for the exit-handler facility. Contact me if you're interested and unsure how to build that. It'd probably be straightforward to add support for other R6RS systems that provide an exit handler and an FFI.