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                      JOURNAL FOR TUESDAY 19TH MAY, 2015
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SUBJECT: Sidetracked for a while...
   DATE: Tue 19 May 21:30:33 BST 2015

It's been a while since my last update, and I don't have one now. So what am I
going to write about? Hrmm...

Well I haven't been sitting on my laurels. I've been sidetracked and working
on a little side project. It's fun stuff and involves tiny, tiny, low power
and low resource systems. I been writing virtual machines, CPU simulators and
assemblers. Pretty fun low level stuff. I wish I could say more, but you never
know this might actually turn into something awesome ;)

It's been ages since I wrote anything in assembler and here I am writing my
own assembler! Takes me back to writing assembler on the BBC Micro with a 6502
processor. I can still remember one summer, lazing out in the garden reading
"Assembly Language Programming for the BBC Micro" by John Ferguson and Tony
Shaw :) I still have the book along with a copy of "The advanced user guide
for the BBC Micro" by Bray, Dickens and Holmes - that black, spiral bound one
that looked like the guide you got with the BBC Micro.

At the moment my assembler is cranky and the source code has to be 'just so'.
However I can compile code and run it in my own VM on my own 'CPU' which is
something. I guess I'll have to dig out and dust off my old copy of the dragon
book, 'Compilers - Principles, Techniques and Tools' by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi
Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman. Yes, I have a nice little library that I have
built up over many years.

While writing this I just had a thought. Virtual machines, containers and
sandboxing are hot topics right now. I wonder if what I have already could be
put to practical use? Currently the assembler and VM/CPU are written in Go.
I've not done any benchmarking or optimisation yet, but things seem quick
enough and for now just having things working is 'good enough'.

Will any of this ever be IN WolfMUD? I doubt it. Will WolfMUD ever run ON it?
Maybe, but it wouldn't be a version written in Go :P

--
Diddymus


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