Upon stumbling on the following article I was blown away by the fact
that only 3Kb of code was needed to run a virtual machine that
executes the ARM's thumb-1 instruction set. Of course they ran the
emulator on an arm processor which uses a superset of that same
instruction set.

http://www.altreonic.com/sites/default/files/Safe_Virtual_Machine_for_C_in_=
less_than_3_KiBytes_0.pdf

(Note the emulator mentioned in the article is not open source, it's
part of some proprietary software suite.)

I have to wonder if there exist other emulators written in C like this
that could be fit in a microcontroller?  I always though that
something like that would be much more complicated, but I suppose all
you need to do is emulate a few registers and decode a handful of
trivial instructions to allow for the execution of programs compiled
with a standard C compiler thats supports Thumb like GCC.


--=20
Jason White
--=20
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