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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T20:17:04+00:00

I’m writing a virtual machine in C just for fun. Lame, I know, but

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I’m writing a virtual machine in C just for fun. Lame, I know, but luckily I’m on SO so hopefully no one will make fun 🙂

I wrote a really quick’n’dirty VM that reads lines of (my own) ASM and does stuff. Right now, I only have 3 instructions: add, jmp, end. All is well and it’s actually pretty cool being able to feed lines (doing it something like write_line(&prog[1], "jmp", regA, regB, 0); and then running the program:

while (machine.code_pointer <= BOUNDS && DONE != true)
{
    run_line(&prog[machine.cp]);
}

I’m using an opcode lookup table (which may not be efficient but it’s elegant) in C and everything seems to be working OK.

My question is more of a “best practices” question but I do think there’s a correct answer to it. I’m making the VM able to read binary files (storing bytes in unsigned char[]) and execute bytecode. My question is: is it the VM’s job to make sure the bytecode is well formed or is it just the compiler’s job to make sure the binary file it spits out is well formed?

I only ask this because what would happen if someone would edit a binary file and screw stuff up (delete arbitrary parts of it, etc). Clearly, the program would be buggy and probably not functional. Is this even the VM’s problem? I’m sure that people much smarter than me have figured out solutions to these problems, I’m just curious what they are!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Is it the VM’s job to make sure the bytecode is well formed or is it just the compiler’s job to make sure the binary file it spits out is well formed?

    You get to decide.

    Best practice is to have the VM do a single check before execution, cost proportional to the size of the program, which is sophisticated enought to guarantee that nothing wonky can happen during execution. Then during actual execution of the bytecode, you run with no checks.
    However, the check-before-running idea can require some very sophisticated analysis, and even the most performance-conscious VMs often have some checks at run time (example: array bounds).

    For a hobby project, I’d keep things simple and have the VM check sanity every time you execute an instruction. The overhead for most instructions won’t be too great.

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