W. Peyton McPhillips

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Systems Project

HawkVM

An educational programming language and virtual machine written in C, built to explore how source code moves through tokenization, parsing, evaluation, and execution.

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Overview

HawkVM is a lower-level programming project focused on understanding how languages work beneath the surface. Instead of using a framework to hide complexity, this project explores the actual pieces involved in reading and executing code.

What I Built

The project includes language features such as print statements, arithmetic expressions, variables, conditional execution, and basic runtime error handling. The goal is not to create a production programming language, but to build a clear educational model of how a small language can be interpreted.

Interpreter Demo

HawkVM Example Programs

These examples show real `.hk` programs and the output produced by the C interpreter. The browser version displays pre-run examples while the full interpreter source lives in the GitHub repository.

example.hk 
print("Hello from HawkVM");
print("This is a tiny interpreted language written in C");
Interpreter Output 
Hello from HawkVM
This is a tiny interpreted language written in C

Note: this website demo shows verified example programs and output from the local C interpreter. Running HawkVM directly in the browser is a future WebAssembly goal.

Technical Decisions

I structured the project around separate responsibilities: scanning source text, recognizing tokens, parsing statements and expressions, and evaluating the resulting logic. This helped me practice breaking a complex system into smaller parts that can be understood and tested.

What I Learned

HawkVM helped me better understand parsing, expression evaluation, control flow, error handling, and the challenges of designing even a small language. It also gave me more confidence working in C and thinking carefully about program structure.