SIO - A variant of the MCxxxx programming language from Shenzhen I/O™

This implementation is a runtime / VM / interpreter that parses and runs an extension of the programming language featured in Zachtronics' Shenzhen I/O.

Example

Write your code in a .sio file:

$x0 # What's this?
# - It's a way to declare your own registers, if you need them. 
# This one refers to an XBus channel x0.

$dat # This is another register. 
# Registers that don't start with p or x are considered *plain registers*.
# Registers that start with p refer to *power channels*, 
# XBus- and Power channels can be used to send data between SIO-files (nodes).

#run this once
@mov 100 acc
mov acc stdout
# - stdout is a register that you can use to write to stdout :)
# What does it write?
# - whatever you give it. It can be string or it can be a number.
#   It's kinda like the stdout you know from C.

sub 1

mov "\n" stdout # A string literal!

tlt acc 1
+ mov "done\n" stdout
+ end # End the program.
slp 1

Motivation

I was looking for something novel that I can implement my solutions for the next advent of code in. I wanted to work with something as annoying and crazy as Shenzhen I/O! Luckily, I found this kotlin project in a dumpster outside a chinese-themed grill.

New Language Features

• Dynamically typed values (yes, the language is now worse), store types such as integers, floating point numbers and char strings! wow
  • Cast values between the types using the cst T instruction. It operates on the acc register.
  • All the acc-related instructions such as acc, add, sub & mul apply to all the types, try them out!
  • Test-instructions are also applicable.
• Declare your own registers at the beginning of a file by writing $name. Use these to store values. XBus and simple I/O registers are used for passing values between multiple nodes, so the prefixes xand p should be for those types of registers only. You still have to declare them and the order of the declarations determine the identity of each port.
• Memory! Declare sequences of memory as special registers.
  • Comes in a sized variant (*name[10] makes a memory register, 10 values long) and an unsized, infinite, variant (*name).
  • Change the element referenced by mov'ing to the accompanying &-register, (&name for both previous examples).
• Use the new built-in registers!
  • Set a clock-speed in Hz by moving to the clk-register. mov -1 clk to enable overclocking (makes it go faster🔥🔥🔥)
  • Read from stdin by requesting n characters by moving to the stdin register. Then, you can access the values by moving from the register.
    • Read until a specific pattern by moving the pattern string into stdin. Useful for reading line-by-line.
  • Write to stdout by moving to the stdout register. Read back what you wrote by moving from stdout (???)
  • Write to stderr by moving to the stderr register.
  • Write to rng to seed a random generator. mov from the register to get a value! Try different types to get different results!
  • Use the xsz, ysz, gfx and pxl registers to render simple raster graphics.
    • Use the kb0 emulated PowerChannel to consume keyboard codes (sent from the raster-window).
• End your program with the new end instruction.

Unfortunately a lot of the documentation was in Zealandic(???) so I don't really know how everything works yet.

Using the program

First, download a release from the releases page. The project is in Kotlin, so it compiles to a .jar file. You need at least Java 8 to run it.

Once you have it, you can run it like:

java -jar sio.jar <your .sio scripts>

That's right, you can run multiple .sio files at the same time. Commmunicating between those files is what the channels are for.

There's also a native version for amd64 linux. This has been compiled with Graalvm so maybe it's faster? However, It's uncertain if graphical sio applications work with the native build.

Enabling graphics

I found a raster-graphics-extension for SIO on a now-defunct meme forum, one of the users was using it as the background for their avatar. It's interesting to play with, so I've merged it into the existing code. It's using the state-of-the-art Java Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) to render graphics, so it should be available for graphics-enabled Java installations.

I wrote an example application (viewed above).

Other examples

Check out the test-resources folder for more examples used in testing.

Don't like it?

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If that doesn't work for you, maybe you can leave the page open until the next time you restart or something. I've added some tasteful art so that the window at least stays decorative.