KnightJIT

Knight implementation with an optimizing register based VM that supports* JIT compilation. Generally outperforms other interpreters while maintaining correctness.

Building

The only requirements for building the KnightJIT interpreter is a C compiler (e.g. clang or gcc), and an installation of git and make. Once these prerequisites are installed, simply run make in the parent directory to build the knight binary as target/knight.

$ make

KnightJIT requires the LuaJIT source code for dynasm aswell as preprocessing. When running make, the LuaJIT repository should be automatically cloned into the target/luajit/ directory.

To modify the build process, the following environment variables can be used:

• EXECUTABLE specifies the name of the compiled binary.
• ARCH specifies the architecture used by dynasm. Generally, this shouldn't be changed.
• JIT_ENABLED specifies whether JIT compilation can be enabled.
• STANDARD specifies whether the interpreter strictly follows the standard, or allows extensions (in this case, command line arguments).
• COMPILER specifies which C compiler is used to build the project.
• LUA specifies which Lua binary to use during compilation. This is not required, as the Makefile will default to the bundled Lua interpreter (minilua) provided by LuaJIT.

It should be noted that if you have changed the LUA environment variable to a Lua binary that is not minilua or LuaJIT, files that utilize dynasm (primarily JIT files) will not be able to be compiled.

Contributing

Information regarding contributions can be found in the CONTRIBUTING.md. Feel free to open a pull request at any time!