How does a virtual machine execute bytecode?(Python Virtual Machine 3)

Learn how virtual machines execute bytecode, covering serialization, VM implementation, and the difference between interpretation and JIT compilation.

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Welcome to the "Python Virtual Machine" Series

Table of Contents

In the previous lesson, we introduced how the compiler translates source code into bytecode. In this lesson, we will continue with the example from the previous lesson to implement a simple virtual machine that will run the generated bytecode.

Let's first take a look at the bytecode defined in the previous lesson.

#define BINARY_MUL      20
#define BINARY_DIV      21
#define BINARY_ADD      23
#define BINARY_SUB      24

#define LOAD_CONST 100

At the end of the last lesson, the generated bytecode was [100, 00, 12, 100, 00, 48, 20, 100, 00, 59, 23]. Let's decode this bytecode.

LOAD_CONST      12
LOAD_CONST      48
BINARY_MUL
LOAD_CONST      59
BINARY_ADD