lowSpag is an assembly-like language except that it doesn't compile into machine code
The goal is to represent assembly languages and having a working assembler and VM for it. I guess you could kinda compare it with MSIL except that MSIL has actual good languages you can use to target it. (and MSIL is faster, lol)
Since it runs in a "VM" written in C# which in itself runs in a "VM" (with JIT Compilation), its definitely slower than machine code.
Yes, you can run lowSpag on bare metal. Whilst not everything is supporting in lowSpagNative and its pretty clunky to work with, it does at least work. Look in the lowSpagNative repo for more information.
There are no docs as of now. Some basics are:
myLabel: defines a label, to get the memory address of it use $myLabel
CONST.TYPE NAME VALUE defines a constant, to get the memory address you also have to use $myConstant, example:
CONST.STR MyString Hello World!
If two constants and labels share the same name, $name will prioritise labels over constants.
Memory addressing works by internally storing a MemoryPointer (uint16, unlike the registers which are uint8). It can be incremented/decremented/set with following instructions: MPTR_INC, MPTR_DEC, MPTR_SET (memory address), MPTR_SETREG (reg1 LSB) (reg2 MSB)
Memory addresses can be manually written too. Example:
JMP #h03FF (hex) or JMP #1234 (dec)
Since the MemoryPointer is a uint16, the maximum memory address is 0xFFFF (65535). This means that you can only access 64KB of memory. The VM included in here allocates 32KB of memory by default.
There are 16 registers. 15 is the Aritmetic Result Register but can obviously be manually written anyways. For registers with aliases, you can use [ALIAS] to reference it. Example: [ARR]
Technically, up to 255 registers could be supported, but the assembler will not allow you to use more than 16 as most implementations of lowSpag only allocate 16 registers.
There is a syscall instruction. Whilst this is a 0x8_ instruction and therefore not required to be implemented.
Syscall ids are also not "standardized", but following are recommend (if not implemented, these calls should be ignored and not cause an error):
- 0x00: SetConsoleForegroundColor (0-15) - Only to affect the next characters printed
- 0x01: SetConsoleBackgroundColor (0-15) - Only to affect the next characters printed
- 0x02: PrintString - Prints a string from memory at memPtr until null byte