9d

Complete software suite for the nand2tetris MOOC course

Intro

The nand2tetris MOOC is a challenging course that teaches how to build a computer from ground up, using logic gates all the way upto the software stack, including a compiler and a rudimentary OS.

The course is quite old, and the software tools that they provide feel a bit dated. We aim to build an alternative suite that will help students of this course.

Beyond the course itself, it can serve as a playground to test various ideas for programming languages, CPU architecture etc. within the limits of the course tooling specifications.

Features

nand2tetris has several tools:

• A digital logic designer based on a hardware description language (called HDL) that lets you wire together gates and simulate them
• A cpu simulator for the HACK CPU that runs machine code
• A VM emulator that executes the JACK VM bytecode
• A HACK platform simulator, that simulates an entire computer including a keyboard and a display

We will attempt to build a complete IDE/Debugger/runtime that wraps all of these

Several ideas to implement:

• Graphical display of HDL circuits, and ability to visually design them (two way visual design)
• HACK assembler/emulator with reversible debugging, breakpoints, watches etc.
• JACK language IDE, with syntactic/semantic highlighting, plugin architecture for new language features
• JACK VM emulator with reversible debugging etc.
• HACK machine emulation with plugin architecture for custom devices
• Generic compiled plugins for handling other experimental CPU architectures and machine code
• JACK VM to native x86 compilation