Hi folks. I will start a sequence of VM related posts called “Journey through the VM”, similar to what Igor did in Deep Smalltalk School. My main focus is that a regular Smalltalker, without any knowledge in VM stuff can understand the basis of it (ObjectMemory, Interpreter, etc). In addition, I expect the reader can download, change, compile, run, and debug (and why not fixing?) the VM.

Later on in the journey, I would also like to talk about what the compiler does, what bytecodes are, how to read them, how they are mapped to the VM, etc. I will also show some hooks or tricks that the VM provides and that are not always known. Moreover, I will explain what a primitive is, how they are executed by the VM, how you can write your own primitives, etc. FFI and writing your own plugin are also in my plans.

It is important to notice that all these posts are thought for VM newbies. I would appreciate if there can be some VM hackers paying attention that I don't say stupid things.

Cheers