Ziglet v0.1.0 - Initial Release - Ziglet Release Notes

I am excited to announce the first public release of Ziglet, a minimalist, high-performance virtual machine written in Zig. This release lays the foundation for a lightweight, secure, and extensible VM that is both easy to understand and highly performant. **Overview** Ziglet v0.1.0 implements a robust core with essential VM capabilities: • A register-based architecture featuring 16 general-purpose registers • A managed memory space of 64KB with safe bounds checking • A stack-based execution model with built-in error handling • A comprehensive instruction set covering arithmetic, control flow, memory operations, and stack manipulation • Debugging support including instruction tracing, execution statistics, hot path detection, and instruction caching for basic performance insights **New Features** 1. **Core Architecture & Execution** - 16 general-purpose registers for computation - A 64KB dedicated memory region with allocation and deallocation managed by the VM - A program counter (PC) driven execution loop that processes a sequence of instructions 2. **Instruction Set Enhancements** - **Arithmetic Operations:** ADD, SUB, MUL, DIV, MOD - **Memory Operations:** LOAD (load immediate value), STORE (store register value to memory), LOAD_MEM (load from memory into register), MEMCPY (copy memory regions) - **Control Flow:** Unconditional and conditional jump instructions (JMP, JEQ, JNE, JGT, JLT, JGE), and comparison operations (CMP) - **Stack Operations:** PUSH and POP for stack manipulation 3. **Debug & Optimization Tools** - An optional debug mode that provides detailed instruction tracing and runtime diagnostics - Execution statistics tracking including instruction count and hot path detection - An instruction cache using AutoHashMap to support future performance optimizations 4. **Error Handling Enhancements** - Comprehensive error reporting with contextual information, source location details, and actionable suggestions - Robust error types to cover memory access violations, invalid instructions, and register errors **Known Issues & Limitations** - The current version focuses exclusively on integer operations and does not yet support more advanced data types such as floating-point numbers or strings. - The instruction set is minimal by design; additional operations (e.g., function calls, branching optimizations) will be added in future releases. - Features such as Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, garbage collection, threading, and a custom scripting language are planned for upcoming versions. - Documentation and example programs are still in development and will be expanded over time. **Release & Upgrade Information** - This release is tagged as v0.1.0, representing our first stable checkpoint. - If you are upgrading from a pre-release or testing build, please ensure that you rebuild the project after pulling the latest changes. - We welcome feedback on this initial version via GitHub issues or community channels. **Future Roadmap** - **Advanced Data Types & Function Calls:** Support for floating-point numbers, strings, arrays, and function frame management. - **JIT Compilation & Garbage Collection:** Enhancements to improve runtime performance and memory management. - **Threading & Concurrency:** Exploring multi-threaded execution environments. - **Custom Scripting Language:** A higher-level language for easier interaction with the VM. - **Enhanced Debugging & Profiling:** More detailed tooling for debugging, breakpoints, and performance profiling. - **Extended APIs & FFI:** Improved interfaces for embedding and communication with other languages. Thank you for trying out Ziglet v0.1.0. Your feedback is invaluable as I continue to refine and extend the project.

Ziglet

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Ziglet v0.1.0 - Initial Release

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