MemeAssembly Playground

This is an online editor & playground for MemeAssembly. Its concept is similar to the Go Playground, but the way it works is quite different.

Please note that this project is in a very beta state and doesn't work that well right now. Some syscalls (write, read) are implemented, but I am aware of some bugs that I have currently not found the solution for.

How it works

This project makes extensive use of WebAssembly. To compile and run a program, the following steps happen:

1. The program is translated to the x86_64-Assembly text representation using the MemeAssembly compiler
   • In order to get the compiler running on the web, I compiled it with emscripten
2. The resulting x86_64-Assembly text is assembled using my assembly-script assembler written in Rust, resulting in x86_64 binary code that could¹ run on a real CPU
   • The main assembly work is done using the iced-x86 crate
3. This assembled binary code is then run using the Unicorn CPU Emulator compiled for WebAssembly
   • The WebAssembly version of this emulator was created by @AlexAltea, my fork just makes sure the compilation works with newer emscripten versions
4. Hooks are added to catch syscalls and do the correct actions (e.g. for reading/writing data from/to the terminal) that would happen on a real Linux system
   • This syscall handler is quite basic and currently has some bugs where characters are written twice

Footnotes

1. Actually the assembler does some tricks that require a very special memory layout and setup to actually run the program, but the website/emulator implements that environment ↩