Building a Virtual Machine for Programming Language

🧙‍♂️ Course Title: Building a Virtual Machine for Programming Language

🚀 Course Headline: Essentials of Low-level Interpretation

🔥 Course Description:

Introduction: Have you ever wondered how programming languages are executed under the hood? What sets a compiler apart from an interpreter? And what is the magic behind a virtual machine and its JIT-compilers? In this course, we'll demystify these concepts and more by building a stack-based virtual machine (VM) for a programming language that shares similarities with JavaScript or Python.

🔍 The Problem with Classical Teachings: Traditional "compiler classes" often present the topic as a complex, almost inaccessible science reserved for advanced engineers. They start with theoretical aspects of formal grammars like Lexical analysis, which can quickly lose students' interest. This approach fails to cover the practical semantics of programming languages comprehensively.

🌍 Our Approach: We believe in hands-on learning. Our course is designed to be concise, focused, and above all, practical. Each lecture is self-sufficient, tailored to cover the essentials directly related to the topic at hand.

🖥️ What You'll Learn: The course is divided into five parts, totaling 29 lectures with numerous sub-topics:

1. VM Basic Operations: Understand Stack and Register VMs, and how they handle compilation of bytecode.
2. Control Flow and Variables: Implement control flow constructs like if expressions and while loops, and work with global variables and disassemblers.
3. Functions and Call Stack: Explore function abstraction, the concept of a call stack, native functions, IILEs (Immediately-invoked lambda expressions), and closures.
4. Closures Implementation: Dive into scope and escape analysis, capturing free variables, and runtime support for closures.
5. Garbage Collection: Learn about automatic memory management with a tracing heap and implement a Mark-Sweep garbage collector.
6. Object-Oriented Programming: Add support for classes and instances to your VM and build the final executable.

🎓 Teaching Method: Our lectures come alive through animated presentations, live coding sessions, and detailed, annotated live-editing notes. We avoid static slides that fail to capture the nuances of these complex topics. Instead, we provide end-to-end examples and assignments for you to implement, ensuring that you're not just watching but actively learning by doing.

🚀 Features:

• Concise and direct content: Each lecture is crafted to be straightforward and to the point.
• Animated presentations with live-editing notes: A multimedia approach to better grasp complex concepts.
• Live coding sessions end-to-end with assignments: Learn by building, step by step.
• Full source code provided: Start from scratch and follow along or use as a reference for your implementation.
• Hands-on approach: We encourage students to implement each detail themselves, rather than simply copying from a final solution.

🎉 Who is this course for? This course is perfect for:

• Aspiring software developers who want to understand how programming languages are executed.
• Students in computer science or related fields interested in compiler design and VM implementation.
• Engineers looking to expand their knowledge of low-level language interpretation and machine architecture.

🛠️ Technical Requirements: A basic understanding of programming is required, but the course content is designed to be accessible to learners with different backgrounds. Familiarity with a language like C++ or JavaScript is beneficial for implementing the VM, as the code can be adapted to other languages easily.

📚 Join us on this journey to unlock the secrets of low-level language interpretation and virtual machine implementation. Let's build something amazing together!