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Bytecode (also called portable codeorp-code[citation needed]) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable[1] source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references (normally numeric addresses) that encode the result of compiler parsing and performing semantic analysis of things like type, scope, and nesting depths of program objects.
The name bytecode stems from instruction sets that have one-byte opcodes followed by optional parameters. Intermediate representations such as bytecode may be output by programming language implementations to ease interpretation, or it may be used to reduce hardware and operating system dependence by allowing the same code to run cross-platform, on different devices. Bytecode may often be either directly executed on a virtual machine (ap-code machine, i.e., interpreter), or it may be further compiled into machine code for better performance.
Since bytecode instructions are processed by software, they may be arbitrarily complex, but are nonetheless often akin to traditional hardware instructions: virtual stack machines are the most common, but virtual register machines have been built also.[2][3] Different parts may often be stored in separate files, similar to object modules, but dynamically loaded during execution.
A bytecode program may be executed by parsing and directly executing the instructions, one at a time. This kind of bytecode interpreter is very portable. Some systems, called dynamic translators, or just-in-time (JIT) compilers, translate bytecode into machine code as necessary at runtime. This makes the virtual machine hardware-specific but does not lose the portability of the bytecode. For example, Java and Smalltalk code is typically stored in bytecode format, which is typically then JIT compiled to translate the bytecode to machine code before execution. This introduces a delay before a program is run, when the bytecode is compiled to native machine code, but improves execution speed considerably compared to interpreting source code directly, normally by around an order of magnitude (10x).[4]
Because of its performance advantage, today many language implementations execute a program in two phases, first compiling the source code into bytecode, and then passing the bytecode to the virtual machine. There are bytecode based virtual machines of this sort for Java, Raku, Python, PHP,[a] Tcl, mawk and Forth (however, Forth is seldom compiled via bytecodes in this way, and its virtual machine is more generic instead). The implementation of Perl and Ruby 1.8 instead work by walking an abstract syntax tree representation derived from the source code.
More recently, the authors of V8[1] and Dart[7] have challenged the notion that intermediate bytecode is needed for fast and efficient VM implementation. Both of these language implementations currently do direct JIT compiling from source code to machine code with no bytecode intermediary.[8]
disassemble function[10] which prints to the standard output the underlying code of a specified function. The result is implementation-dependent and may or may not resolve to bytecode. Its inspection can be utilized for debugging and optimization purposes.[11] Steel Bank Common Lisp, for instance, produces:(disassemble '(lambda (x) (print x)))
; disassembly for (LAMBDA (X))
; 2436F6DF: 850500000F22 TEST EAX, [#x220F0000] ; no-arg-parsing entry point
; E5: 8BD6 MOV EDX, ESI
; E7: 8B05A8F63624 MOV EAX, [#x2436F6A8] ; #<FDEFINITION object for PRINT>
; ED: B904000000 MOV ECX, 4
; F2: FF7504 PUSH DWORD PTR [EBP+4]
; F5: FF6005 JMP DWORD PTR [EAX+5]
; F8: CC0A BREAK 10 ; error trap
; FA: 02 BYTE #X02
; FB: 18 BYTE #X18 ; INVALID-ARG-COUNT-ERROR
; FC: 4F BYTE #X4F ; ECX
>>> import dis # "dis" - Disassembler of Python byte code into mnemonics.
>>> dis.dis('print("Hello, World!")')
1 0 LOAD_NAME 0 (print)
2 LOAD_CONST 0 ('Hello, World!')
4 CALL_FUNCTION 1
6 RETURN_VALUE
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[…] In fact, the format is basically the same in MS-DOS 3.3 - 8.0, PC DOS 3.3 - 2000, including Russian, Lithuanian, Chinese and Japanese issues, as well as in Windows NT, 2000, and XP […]. There are minor differences and incompatibilities, but the general format has not changed over the years. […] Some of the data entries contain normal tables […] However, most entries contain executable code interpreted by some kind of p-code interpreter at *runtime*, including conditional branches and the like. This is why the KEYB driver has such a huge memory footprint compared to table-driven keyboard drivers which can be done in 3 - 4 Kb getting the same level of function except for the interpreter. […]
[…] Matthias [R.] Paul […] warns that the IBM PC DOS version of the keyboard driver uses some internal procedures that are not recognized by the Microsoft driver, so, if possible, you should use the IBM versions of both KEYB.COM and KEYBOARD.SYS instead of mixing Microsoft and IBM versions […](NB. What is meant by "procedures" here are some additional bytecodes in the IBM KEYBOARD.SYS file not supported by the Microsoft version of the KEYB driver.)
Multiplan wasn't compiled to machine code, but to a kind of byte-code which was run by an interpreter, in order to make Multiplan portable across the widely varying hardware of the time. This byte-code distinguished between the machine-specific floating point format to calculate on, and an external (standard) format, which was binary coded decimal (BCD). The PACK and UNPACK instructions converted between the two.
