Future Plans

Plans & Enhancements

I. Language and Runtime Enhancements

1. Customizable Syntax: Allow users to define their own syntax for MVM assembly language, enabling domain-specific languages or personalized coding styles.
2. Built-in Data Structures: Implement built-in support for more complex data structures like hash maps, trees, and graphs, accessible through standard library functions or new instructions.
3. Type Inference: Add type inference to your higher-level language (if you create one), reducing the need for explicit type declarations.
4. Automatic Memory Management: Explore garbage collection algorithms (mark-and-sweep, reference counting) to automate memory management and prevent memory leaks.
5. Reflection API: Allow programs running in the VM to inspect and manipulate their own structure and behavior (e.g., access register values, inspect the call stack).
6. Dynamic Linking: Enable dynamic linking of libraries or modules, allowing programs to load and use external code at runtime.

II. Virtualisation and System-Level Features

7. Nested Virtualisation: Allow running a VM inside your MVM! (Requires careful resource management).
8. Hardware Emulation (Beyond Simple Devices): Emulate more complex hardware, like a simplified GPU, sound card, or network card with packet routing capabilities.
9. Virtual Machine Introspection: Provide tools or system calls that allow VM programs to inspect and modify the VM's state.
10. Snapshots and Checkpointing: Enable saving and restoring the complete VM state or creating checkpoints during program execution for debugging and fault tolerance.
11. Process Migration: Allow migrating running processes between different instances of your MVM (if you have multiple VMs running).
12. System Call Sandboxing: Implement security mechanisms to restrict system call access for untrusted programs.

III. Concurrency and Parallelism

13. User-Level Threads: Implement user-level threads within the VM, managed by a user-space thread library.
14. Multicore Support: Extend the VM to support multiple emulated cores, enabling true parallelism. (Requires a more sophisticated scheduler.)
15. Asynchronous I/O: Implement asynchronous I/O operations for virtual devices, allowing processes to continue execution while waiting for I/O to complete.
16. SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) Instructions: Add SIMD instructions to perform parallel operations on vectors of data.

IV. Debugging and Development Tools

17. Time-Travel Debugging: Implement a debugger that allows stepping backward through program execution to analyze program behavior.
18. Code Coverage Analysis: Add tools to measure code coverage during testing.
19. Performance Profiler: Develop tools to profile CPU usage, memory access patterns, and other performance metrics.
20. Bytecode Disassembler: Create a tool to disassemble MVM bytecode back into assembly language for easier analysis.

V. Advanced VM Features

21. Just-in-Time (JIT) Compiler: Compile frequently executed bytecode into native machine code for performance gains (challenging, as it's architecture-specific).
22. Ahead-of-Time (AOT) Compiler: Compile MVM bytecode into native executables for specific platforms.
23. Garbage Collection: Implement garbage collection algorithms to automate memory management.
24. Foreign Function Interface (FFI): Allow MVM programs to call functions written in other languages (e.g., C/C++).
25. Bytecode Verification: Add bytecode verification to ensure that loaded programs are well-formed and don't violate security policies.

VI. Random Ideas

26. Non-Deterministic Execution: Implement instructions with probabilistic outcomes, creating a non-deterministic execution environment (interesting for simulations or genetic algorithms).
27. MVM as a Service: Create a web service that allows users to upload and run MVM programs remotely.

This document details planned enhancements for the MVM. This is a high-level view, and the prioritization and specifics are subject to change.