VM Improvements and New Commiter @zerbina

[saem]

The announcement is a bit late, but better now than never.

We'd like to extend a very warm welcome to @zerbina as our latest committer. Their numerous contributions, especially to the VM, have not only made it much easier to work with but brought in a number of improvements across the compiler, language, and libraries.

From the beginning they have been amazing to collaborate with. Whether it's being open to new ideas, providing thoughtful and constructive feedback, patiently explaining concepts, rubber ducking with myself or others, or through their contributions making the code base and language more accessible for present and future contributors. It's folks like @zerbina and their contributions that foster a sustainable community.

Adding @zerbina as a committer is our way of saying thanks and materially demonstrating how much we appreciate their contribution, efforts, and judgment.

Happy bors-ing, @zerbina!

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As mentioned above @zerbina's efforts in the VM have resulted in a number of improvements both within and without, you can see a list
here.

The rework of the internals, fixes, and enhancements are all steps towards eventually having:

• the VM as a first class backend, testing or light weight interpreter
• a reference implementation of pure NimSkull semantics, part of the spec
• the compiler as a library on any backend (including JS)
• broader compiler internals rework unblocked and easing contributions

Goals like the above require many steps and these recent ones have been driven by, @zerbina. It began with the initial large scale
refactoring that simplified the VM's memory model to contiguous raw bytes instead of a sea of AST nodes. This meant entirely new data types for the VM that are decoupled from the AST, clean-up of VM operations, lots of docs, tests, and fixes to a number of language inconsistencies across targets.

In addition:

• error handling within the VM consistently use exceptions internally which are translated at the edge (returning to the compiler)
• consistency across backends/gc for: exceptions, variants, and more
• removed legacy/partial features such as compile-time C FFI

A fuller list is can be seen by skimming the VM commit log.

Thanks for reading!

[canelhasmateus]

I , for one, welcome our new zerbina overlord.