asmjit VS ubpf

Some other instruction sets in some JSON: https://github.com/asmjit/asmjit/tree/master/db

The attentive reader may notice that this code is from a third-party library. So, we didn't want to include it in the article at first. However, we found something interesting. In 2017, somebody opened an issue in the asmjit project: the GCC 7.2 compiler issued a warning to the code above. The project authors fixed it:

You can use something like https://asmjit.com/ to generate and call x64 code at runtime.

But an easy to create a JIT would be to use https://github.com/asmjit/asmjit, which is used in RPCS3.

You could go the way of https://asmjit.com (or forth) and make it your assembler DSL on top of the low-level call.

But if you're willing to get closer to the hardware is https://github.com/bitfunnel/nativejit/ and https://asmjit.com/

https://github.com/asmjit/asmjit is nice. But using a JIT seems like a sledgehammer working around a lacking design.

eBPF doesn't run in user space in the context of eBPF in the linux kernel. It's verified so that the kernel can be sure it won't loop forever and then gets JIT'ed and run in kernel space.

There are some user space BPF vms like https://github.com/iovisor/ubpf and Solana.

ubpf: https://github.com/iovisor/ubpf

The usual recommendation have been given. Now for more touristic approach what I would like to use if given excuse and time. All those options are mostly written in C:

- QBE [1] - small compiler backend with nice IL

- DynASM [2] - IIUC the laujit's backend, that can and is used by other languages

- uBPF - Userspace eBPF VM. Depending on your DSL the eBPF toolchain could fit your use-case, but this would probably be the biggest excursion.

[1] https://c9x.me/compile/

[2] https://luajit.org/dynasm.html

[3] https://github.com/iovisor/ubpf

There are eBPF-specific userspace implementations you can consider looking into but right now the best support for bpf would be the linux kernel so if the goal is learning you'll most likely want to run linux in a proper virtual machine (e.g. Qemu, VirtualBox, Parallels, etc.)

This may be entirely irrelevant to what you are looking for, but a good widely used finite register-based VM is the eBPF VM in the Linux Kernel. The IOVisor uBPF project (https://github.com/iovisor/ubpf) is a version of the VM in user space.