Virtual Machine

Hello /prague/

I'm working on implementing a virtual machine of my own design. I started by writing the ALU, and I decided that it should operate on 32 bit words. It allows for many of the basic functions (NOT, AND, OR, XOR, >>, <<, +, -, *, /).

I am entirely new to designing machines (I'm a college sophomore.) and I ran into the problem of representation of floating point data. Is this implemented directly into the hardware of computers, or does software manipulate words to create floating point number manipulation higher up?

CPUs have had native floating point support for decades now. These days it is only implemented in software to meet special requirements, and rarely at that because most use cases (reproducibility, strict error checking, stricter rounding) can be achieved with a thin wrapper around hardware (see: Java).