lc3sim-c

A C implementation of the LC-3 virtual machine, an educational computer architecture.

Read tutorial here

How to build

This project uses CMake to support a variety of build systems, platforms, and IDEs. Many IDEs support opening CMake projects natively, and others support opening CMake projects through the use of IDE plugins or CMake generators. You can also use CMake's command line generators to build using make or ninja.

For details on building and running CMake projects, I'd recommend reading An Introduction to Modern CMake: Running CMake, checking your IDE's documentation for details about its compatibility with CMake, or reading the CMake manual for details about supported IDEs and generators.

Build using command line

If your IDE isn't supported or you'd prefer to build using a command line generator, it's easy to get started. For example, to build in debug mode:

# initialize the build scripts
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

# build or rebuild as often as needed
cmake --build build

# run the vm
./build/lc3sim /path/to/lc3-program.obj

If you find yourself in need of trace-level logs for the VM's state, you can enable them by turning on the ENABLE_TRACING flag and then rebuilding:

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DENABLE_TRACING=ON
cmake --build build

Running tests

At the time of writing these instructions, this project only has a single "hello world!" unit test. Even so, this simple test can still detect some more obvious failures if something goes really wrong.

The unit tests for this project are defined using standard CMake/CTest conventions, so to run them, you can either use your IDE's integrated unit test runner (if it has one), or by running the following on command line:

# initialize the build scripts if you haven't already
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

# build or rebuild if you haven't already
cmake --build build

# run the tests
ctest --test-dir build