I've wanted to make a language where the memory and the graphics output were interlinked. Meaning your memory was always visible and you had to balance memory usage and graphics usage. For some reason it took me too long to realize I needed to make a VM to make that a reality. Because of that goal, I decided to design the VM around a simplistic goal of having all program memory in one block. While this isn't realistic (a real machine wouldn't have its registers stored in the same memory as stored memory), I decided I didn't care.
So in the end, there was one core idea I wanted to play with, but I also wanted to teach myself more about ISA design and explore that area more.
I still dont understand why it requires a VM. What do you mean by 'interlinked' and 'always visible'. What does C lack that means this would not be possible? Does 'balance memory usage and graphics usage' refer to designing for very small systems with only a few megabytes?
Yeah, you could do it in C. I just didn't want to. The other part was that I wanted to make a language. I didn't want to piggyback off of something else.
I mean interlinked is that your memory that you have to use for your application is also the memory that gets treated as a pixel buffer. So when you want to draw, you write directly to your pixel buffer. When I mean balancing memory usage and graphics usage I mean if you use too much memory, too much screens real-estate would be used.