jart/blink

This repository contains two programs: blink and blinkenlights. Blink is a virtual machine that runs programs compiled for x86-64 Linux on other operating systems and hardware architectures. If you have a Linux binary and want to run it on a Mac, a FreeBSD machine, or a computer with an ARM or RISC-V chip, blink can do that without requiring Linux itself. It works similarly to a tool called qemu-x86_64, but it is dramatically smaller: around 221 kilobytes, compared to about 4 megabytes for the QEMU equivalent. Blinkenlights is a separate visual debugging tool that runs in a terminal window. Unlike a traditional debugger where you type commands and read text output, blinkenlights shows animated panels of memory and registers as you step through a program instruction by instruction. You can scroll and zoom those panels with your mouse wheel. You can also rewind execution history by scrolling over the assembly code display, which makes it easier to trace backwards when something goes wrong. Blink runs on Linux (including ARM, RISC-V, MIPS, PowerPC, s390x), macOS on both Intel and Apple Silicon, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows via Cygwin. To build it, you need a C compiler that supports the C11 standard and a modern version of GNU Make. The build process follows the standard configure-then-make pattern. A tiny build mode is available that strips the binary down to around 115 kilobytes with no performance penalty, useful if you want to ship blink as a minimal embedded tool. Blink includes just-in-time compilation on supported architectures, which contributes to it running faster than QEMU on several benchmarks, particularly for math-heavy workloads. Optional features like VFS emulation, threads, and extended math support can each be toggled at configure time to further shrink or tune the binary. The project ships with over 700 test programs and passes hundreds of test suites from projects including the Linux Test Project and the Musl Libc test suite. The full README is longer than what was shown.