LAVAL simulator

This repository contains documentation and source code for the LAVAL CPU and its simulator. The LAVAL CPU is a custom made CPU architecture and ISA first made as a challenge for the CSGames 2018. Participants had to program simple algorithms in assembly.

For more information on the architecture, refer to the manual:

English documentation

Documentation française

Some examples programs are available here:

; Compute the base 2 logarithm of a rounded down. result = floor(log2(a))

.cores 1, 1, 2
.mem_number 5
.mem_size 5
.core_to_mem 0, 3
.in 0

0:
    MUX CURRENT, BEFORE, CURRENT
    MXL
    MUX CURRENT, CURRENT, AFTER
    JMP 1

1:
    JEZ 2
    LSR 1
    MXD
    SYN
    JMP 1

2:
    MXL
    SYN
    CSU 1
    HLT

3:
    MUX CURRENT, CURRENT, BEFORE
    JMP 4

4:
    SYN
    MXD
    CAD 1
    JMP 4

Getting Started

Prerequisites

To compile this project you need:

GCC >= 7.1
cmake

GCC 7 is available in ArchLinux Core repository and in Ubuntu 17.10. If you are using an older Ubuntu release, you can use this ppa to easily download a new GCC version. Any distros should work as long as you somehow install GCC 7.

It should be possible to build this project using a recent version of Clang but it currently have issues compiling some C++ features. Refer to 31852 and 33222 for more information. It is probably feasible to work around those bug by using clang's libc++ instead of GCC's libstdc++. Please contact me if you successfully built this project using clang.

To compile documentation from markdown to pdf, you need

pandoc

Compiling

Simulator:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Documentation:

cd doc
./build.sh

Running the tests

Tests are programmed using the Catch2 testing framework. After compiling, run the generated test executable:

./build/lib/tests/LavalTests

As of today, some tests are outdated, expect some failures.

Using the simulator

Please refer to its included help:

./build/sources/simulator --help

For most use cases, you probably want to both compile and simulate your programs like so:

./build/sources/simulator -cs lib/tests/integration/multiplication.laval

Called this way, the simulator will get its inputs from stdin. This also allows you to provide inputs using a file:

./build/sources/simulator -cs lib/tests/integration/gaussian_small.laval < lib/tests/integration/spaceship.in

Built With

• catch2 - Test framework
• cereal - Used by the assembler to serialize some structure to binary
• GSL - A useful library to support modern and safe C++ development

Authors

• Jérôme de Courval - jdecourval

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.

Acknowledgments

• TIS-100, an assembly language programming game nobody never asked for but greatly inspired me!