Project

Detailed information about the project as a whole, in addition to all of the component subprojects. Technical overviews, project status updates, protocol specifications, and user guides will all live here as they become available.

Project < Cohost

Cohost executes COINS, and hosts the Co language. It is a reference implementation of the Core CPU virtual machine which conforms to the COINS specification. It will also provide helper functionality to dynamically load routines into memory while the CPU is running, though this will eventually be baked into a lightweight operating system that runs on the core itself. Cohost is written in Rust.

Design Goals

Coming Soon.

Installation

From Source

To build from source, you must have the Rust toolchain installed on your machine. Given that, you can install with:

						$ git clone https://git.sr.ht/~jakintosh/cohost
$ cargo install --path cohost
					

Download

If you don't mind downloading executable binaries off the internet (or don't have Rust installed), you can download the latest Linux binary below and drop it in a directory on your $PATH.

cohost v0.6.0 (Linux)

To do the same from the command line:

						$ sudo curl http://coalescent.computer/downloads/cohost -o /usr/local/bin/cohost
$ sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/cohost
					

To verify:

						$ shasum -a 256 `which cohost`
> 3a00c4c35e2aaf5b6f216678a9bf4fd111e38e91eb50fb38ff378b1e4818d129
					

You can now use the cohost CLI via the command line. The program binary as of 0.6.0 using Rust 1.74.0 is 518kb on Arch Linux.

Usage

The cohost CLI has two subcommand branches: run for executing binaries, and device for launching and attaching devices.

cohost run

To run the machine, first you need to build a ROM using the co toolchain, or with any other process that produces a valid COINS binary. From there, you can point to that binary file using the command's only required parameter:

$ cohost run <rom-file>

The run command has three options:

  • -d/--debug: shows a step-by-step debug execution visualizer (press ENTER to step)
  • -p/--profile: shows a profile of the program on completion (program must gracefully end)
  • -t/--terminates: the CPU will exit when it returns with an empty return stack instead of becoming idle, which is the default behavior

Realistically, --profile can only be used right now in conjunction with --terminates, since otherwise the program never gracefully exits to show profiler information. Profile currently only shows the total number of executed instructions.

Two equivalent real-world examples using options:

						$ cohost run -dt stack-test.rom
$ cohost run --debug --terminates stack-test.rom
					

cohost device

The cohost CLI also includes the ability to launch and attach a console to the running instance.

$ cohost device console

The console allows one to send text data into the running cohost instance, and also display text that is output from the machine.

Related Devlogs

August 14, 2023 August 10, 2023 August 9, 2023 July 9, 2023 July 7, 2023 July 5, 2023 July 3, 2023 July 2, 2023 July 1, 2023 June 30, 2023 June 29, 2023 June 28, 2023 June 27, 2023 June 26, 2023