About

Scribe is a statically typed, compiled (currently, to C), procedural systems programming language with a focus on minimalism, simplicity, and utility.

It attempts to find a balance between the complexities of C++ and the barebones nature of C. As such, it is mostly inspired by C, while containing the member function syntax like that in C++. There are also features taken from the Zig programming language.

Check out the language/compiler reference manual (WIP) here: https://scribe-lang.github.io/book.

Examples

1. Hello World

let io = @import("std/io");

let main = fn(): i32 {
	io.println("Hello World");
	return 0;
};

2. A Basic Function

let io = @import("std/io");

let func = fn(data: *const i8) {
	io.println("Hello ", data);
};

let main = fn(): i32 {
	func("Electrux");
	return 0;
};

3. Factorial of 5

let io = @import("std/io");

let facto = fn(data: i32): i32 {
	let f = 1;
	for let i = data; i > 1; --i {
		f *= i;
	}
	return f;
};

let main = fn(): i32 {
	io.println("Factorial of 5 is: ", facto(5));
	return 0;
};

4. Structures And Member Functions

There are no classes. Only structs. And even though member functions are present, they are not encapsulated within structs. Instead, they can be freely created across the code and used anywhere after the declaration.

This essentially allows one to write custom member functions on existing structs and therefore augment is as desired.

let io = @import("std/io");
let string = @import("std/string");

let Point = struct {
	x: i32;
	y: u32;
	z: f64;
};

let str in const Point = fn(): string.String {
	let str = string.new();
	str.appendCStr("{");
	str.appendInt(self.x);
	str.appendCStr(", ");
	str.appendUInt(self.y);
	str.appendCStr(", ");
	str.appendFlt(self.z);
	str.appendCStr("}");
	return str;
};

let main = fn(): i32 {
	let point = Point{1, 2, 3.25};
	io.println("Point: ", point);
	// another way:
	let str = point.str();
	defer str.deinit();
	io.println("Point: ", str);
	return 0;
};

Installation

Prerequisites

To install Scribe, the following programs are required:

• A C++11 standard compliant compiler
• CMake (build system - for compiling the project)

Note: Scribe doesn't yet support Windows.

Building

Once the prerequisites have been met, clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/scribe-lang/scribe.git

Inside the repository, create a directory (say build), cd in it and run the commands for building and installing Scribe:

cd scribe && mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release # optionally PREFIX_DIR=<dir> can be set before this
make -j install

By default, PREFIX_DIR=$HOME/.scribe. Once installation is done, execute the installed scribe binary ($PREFIX_DIR/bin/scribe) to use the Scribe language.

Usage

Once you have the scribe binary, simply using ${path_to_scribe_binary}/scribe <file name> to compile a scribe program.

That will generate a <file name> binary in your current directory - without the .sc extension. The generated binary is the executable.

Syntax Highlighting Extensions

As of right now, there is a language syntax highlighting extension available for Visual Studio Code editor. Installation steps can be found on its repository.

Visual Studio Code: scribe-lang/scribecode