3.8 Emulation Primitives

The functions documented in this section can be used to take very specific control over the evaluation of virtual code applications. It is unlikely that a client program will have any need for them unless it aims to replace or extend the avm_apply function.

The virtual machine is somewhat removed from a conventional von Neumann model of computation, so emulating it in C or any other imperative language is less straightforward than one would prefer. An elaborate system of interdependent data structures is used to represent partially evaluated computations, which does not particularly lend itself to a convenient, modular API. The abstraction provided by the functions in this section is limited mainly to that of simple memory management and stack operations. Consequently, a developer wishing to build on them effectively would need to grok the data structures involved, which are described in some detail.

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