Building a bytecode instruction set for Jzero

This section describes a simple file format and instruction set for Jzero code, generated from three-address intermediate code. For the language that you create, you might use a subset of the Java bytecode instruction set instead. Java bytecode is a complicated format; if it wasn't, we wouldn't be going to the trouble of presenting something simpler. The instruction set presented here is slightly more capable than Jzero uses, to allow for common extensions.

Defining the Jzero bytecode file format

The Jzero format consists of a header, followed by a data section, followed by a sequence of instructions. Jzero files are interpreted as a sequence of 8-byte words in little-endian format. The header consists of an optional self-execution script, a magic word, a version number, and the word offset of the first instruction, relative to the magic word. A self-execution script is a set of commands written in some platform-dependent...