spacey

a tiny whitespace interpreter/virtual machine in rust

project roadmap

• whitespace parser
• whitespace virtual machine
• usable exposed crate API
• spacey executable
• LLVM backend to compile to standalone executable
• termion/ncurses frontend with debugging capabilities
• make IO faster, get rid of .clone()'s in Interpreter::next_instruction()

building and running

make sure you have rust and the rust package manager cargo installed on your system. if not, the easiest way to do so is to install rust via rustup.rs.

then, clone the repository and run as follows:

git clone https://github.com/D3PSI/spacey.git
cd spacey
cargo build --release

to run the provided executable run:

cargo run --release -q -- -h

to show the help screen.

execute whitespace-files like:

cargo run --release -q -- -f ws/hello_world.ws

*data extrapolated from single-instruction benchmark (cargo bench), which executes a single PushStack followed by an Exit instruction. benchmark run on a single Intel i7-7700K CPU core clocked at 5.1 GHz. this measurement is statistically significant because it was made with the criterion.rs statistical benchmarking suite. for comparison, the reference interpreter in Haskell manages 94.5 million instructions per second, according to this. according to the same project, a JIT implementation beats spacey by about 200 million instructions per second, i.e., is a respectable (but only, considering JIT) around 25% faster than spacey. with some work I am confident I could match those numbers