Write Your Own Virtual Machine
I once wrote my own virtual machine in college, complete with compiler and assembler, and I cannot recommend doing this enough. Especially the virtual machine part is not nearly as difficult as you would imagine, and to this day (15 years later) I still rely on the things i learned here.<p>The knowledge you gain from implementing a virtual machine translates reasonably well to inner workings of a CPU, and you’ll have a much better understanding of things like stacks, frame pointers and the overhead of calling a function. It will be completely obvious to you why “i++” is slower than “++i”.<p>Thanks for sharing this article.