Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
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Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
#2TikTok shipping XOR cipher'd bytecode & interp is right up there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109771
Re: Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
#3This list is entirely incomplete without mentioning Java Card.
There is a tiny Java Bytecode VM in an insanely large list of places, you can find some of them here:
https://github.com/crocs-muni/javacard-curated-list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card
Re: Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
#4There is one in golang regular expressions https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html
I guess that is why you say re.Compile.
Re: Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
#5There is one in golang regular expressions https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html I guess that is why you say re.Compile.
Interesting. Not that surprising that it works like this. But isn't it a little surprising that things like regexes, printf syntax and other DSLs aren't mostly handled and parsed at compile time in 2026?
Re: Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
#6There is one in golang regular expressions https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html I guess that is why you say re.Compile.
All regular expressions are deterministic final automata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_finite_automaton (finally, a use for my CS course); the extent to which that counts as a virtual machine varies. Some of the regex syntaxes extend it in ways which don't fit in a DFA and do count as a VM; Perl-compatible RE used to be popular (e.g. in Exim).
Re: Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
#7Quake had it’s own vm also
Re: Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
#8There is one in golang regular expressions https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html I guess that is why you say re.Compile.
That goes back to Ken Thompson's NFA regex interpreter from 1968 [1], [2], [3]. Note: that whole regex series by Russ Cox [4] is great.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/363347.363387 -- Programming Techniques: Regular expression search algorithm
[2] https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html -- Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast
[3] https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html -- Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach
[4] https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/ -- Implementing Regular Expressions
Re: Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
#9TikTok shipping XOR cipher'd bytecode & interp is right up there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109771
VM for obfuscation is a whole thing. Denuvo has a particularly complicated one https://connorjaydunn.github.io/blog/posts/denuvo-analysis/
Other game examples using VMs not for obfuscation: Z-machine and SCUMM-VM.
Re: Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
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