Derek Leroux - Processor

Sometimes, I get nerd-sniped by compilers or other low-level parts of the stack, or this magical term "The hardware does it".

I made a quarantine repo to hold some of this work, so I could just get it out through my fingers and out of my mind, and move on to things that are a bit more practical. This backfired hard, the more I've worked on this project the more interested I've gotten. I don't expect I'll stop before finishing the rest of the coolest parts.

The final result will be 3 major pieces which together mean I can take a normal C program, use my own compiler to compile into my own custom assembly language, and assemble and link down to a custom formatted binary, and run it on this processor that I've implemented in software.

The video will explain a model of how computers work, then move on to me demoing what I've built, the working CPU implementation.

Background information

The Computer

There are the special registers, and the general purpose registers, fundementally, we don't need to tread all of them as special, but it simplifies hardware to only hold the pointer to the next instruction in one register, and there is no waste as we always need to have one register taken up with this.

stack pointer register also don't need to be special either, it could float to other registers, but again, what's does the increased flexibility buy us? The status register is the only one that really needs to be special, but its easier for everyone to conseptualize and implement if we tread several of them as special, and in general we'll have several other registers we'll treat as special too, for example lr on arm.

What the Computer is going to do next

An instruction is the minimal unit of a program. One instruction is (generally) just one line of assembly lanugage. The program counter holds (a pointer to) the next instruction to be executed.

What I've built

I've built a few pieces of this already as of this presentation.

I've designed my assembly language, my own model of a computer.

The computer, implemented in software (think of it like an emulator, but the underlying computer does not exist yet in hardware). Much of the assembler, and some of the compiler.

I'll demonstrate real instructions, encoded in my format, parsed from my assembly language, running, and updating the state of the CPU.

Live demonstration / presentation

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Context on the project