“Hello world” in Bismuth

Late last year, we talked about Bismuth, a virtual machine being developed by Eniko Fox, one of the developers of the awesome game Kitsune Tails. Part of a operating systems development side project, Bismuth is a VM (think Java Virtual Machine, not VMware) on top of Fox’ custom kernel, designed specifically to run programs in a sandbox. The first article detailed the origins of Bismuth, and the second article delved into memory safety, sandboxing, and more.

We’re a few months down the line now, and Fox recently published another article in the series, this time explaining how a hello world-program works in Bismuth.

This is the third in a series of posts about a virtual machine I’m developing as a hobby project called Bismuth. I’ve talked a lot about Bismuth, mostly on social media, but I don’t think I’ve done a good job at communicating how you go from some code to a program in this VM. In this post I aim to rectify that by walking you through the entire life cycle of a hello world Bismuth program, from the highest level to the lowest.
↫ Eniko Fox

There’s a ton of detail here, and at the end you’ll have a pretty solid grip on how Bismuth works.