I’m working on this project: Corewar description.

The goal is to build a Virtual Machine and an Assembler for the Corewar game.

• The Assembler takes assembly code (.s) and turns it into binary programs (.cor).
• The Virtual Machine loads those .cor files into a shared circular memory (the arena) and runs them cycle by cycle.

Note: I’m only working on the VM — the assembler is being implemented by a peer Assembler.

• Each program (player) starts with a single process.

• A process has its own registers, a program counter (PC), and a carry flag.

• Players can execute instructions to:

  • move through memory,
  • copy or modify data,
  • create new processes,
  • and call live to prove they’re still alive.

The VM periodically checks which processes executed live. If a process hasn’t, it dies. The last player to say it’s alive wins the match.

I’m building the VM step by step:

• memory management with a circular arena
• processes with registers and program counters
• instruction set decoding and execution
• cycle scheduling and process life/death checks
• loading players and handling game flow

For now, I’m only using the Rust standard library, so there are no external dependencies to worry about.

The project includes a playground with a reference assembler, VM, and test players. You can run the project with:

make run

This will launch the VM with a simple example setup.

You can track what’s completed and what’s pending in the todo.md file.