Spiceweight

Spiceweight is an interpreter for the Whitespace programming language written in Crystal. It provides a handful of very useful features, to include:

• negative heap addressing, which allows standard library routines (such as the ones in libspw) to perform their work without any risk of clobbering the "user" data in positive heap space. This breaks spec with the reference implementation, but it's a worthwhile trade-off.
• arbitrary-precision integers, but only when necessary; Spiceweight checks whether an arithmetic operation would overflow and only then promotes the result to BigInt, so no undue performance penalty is incurred. This feature is notably absent from some otherwise excellent interpreters, such as Pavel Shub's wspace.
• benchmarking calls to labels whose names begin with "bench", so long as a symbol file has been previously generated by a tool such as spw.

Installation

Simply have Crystal installed and run make to build the executable (spwt). You can then copy it to a $PATH directory of your choosing or run the provided ./install script to automate the process.

Usage

$ spwt --help
Usage: spwt [OPTIONS] FILE
    -r, --report                     Display stack, heap, and instruction count after executing
    -b, --bench                      Benchmark calls to labels whose names begin with 'bench'
Labels in Whitespace code are purely numerical, of course, so this relies on
some other tool having previously generated a symbol table mapping label names
to their corresponding numbers. The Spitewaste assembler is one such tool.
    -h, --help                       Show this help

In most cases, you'll simply want to run spwt foo.ws to execute a Whitespace program. The --report switch is nice for ensuring that your program exits with a clean stack. The symbol file needed by --bench is automatically generated and stored somewhere Spiceweight knows to find it by the Spitewaste assembler when passing --symbol-file=% to spw exec|convert.