Unicorn... Fig? What the heck?

Unicorn Fig is a terrible play on the words "universal" and "configuration".

This project consists of two parts. The first is an interpreter and code-generation tool, called Unicorn. The second is a small Lisp dialect, called Fig, which Unicorn interprets and runs.

Unicorn, when run on Fig program files, interprets and runs Fig code like a standard Lisp interpreter. However, instead of simply running the code and stopping there, Unicorn serializes data defined in your Fig program and outputs it to your choice of JSON or YAML. On top of all that, Unicorn can also generate Go code containing a Configuration struct as well as JSON and YAML-parsing functions that will load data into the aforementioned struct.

Now you have my attention

UnicornFig has the ambitious goal of becoming a really simple "Emacs Lisp for everyone." What that essentially means is that it hopes to not just be yet another Lisp implementation, but rather a Lisp interpreter that outputs configuration files in familiar formats like JSON and YAML as well as Golang code containing structs for data.

How do I get started?

The first thing to do is of course to clone the repository and build the interpreter. Of course, to do this, you will need to have Git and Go installed on your computer.

git clone https://github.com/arcrose/UnicornFig.git
cd UnicornFig
sh build.sh

Now you can begin learning the language by checking out the introductory guide in docs/guide.md and/or by reading the example programs showing off the language's features in examples/. All of the code there can be executed by Unicorn.

You can run a Fig program by running the following command:

./unicorn -json output.json -yaml config.yaml -go config.go <file>.fig

The -json, -yaml, and -go arguments are optional. If none are provided, Unicorn will execute the program file provided and not write to any files.

Note: It is possible to run multiple Fig programs by providing their paths after the first file. The programs will be run in sequence, and the environment created by one program will become the intiial environment of the following program. For example, the Fig programs.

test1.fig

(define
    (firstWord "fig"))

test2.fig

(define
    (secondWord "is"))

and test3.fig

(define
    (thirdWord "awesome!"))

When run with the command:

./unicorn -json out.json test1.fig test2.fig test3.fig

It will produce:

{
    "firstWord": "fig",
    "secondWord": "is",
    "thirdWord": "awesome!"
}

You can see a practical example of how you might use Unicorn and Fig in the demo contained in the repository. Further, you can see a full example of Uniorn's code generation in use in the demo/code-gen directory.

It is advised that users read the demo/code-gen/README.md file to understand how the feature works and what its shortcomings are.

Vim syntax highlighting

For vim users, I've created an ftplugin, ftdetect, and syntax file for vim that provide reasonable syntax highlighting for Fig code. Everything is located in the vim/ directory. There is also a vim/install.sh script that you can run to automatically copy the necessary files to the right place.

Feedback? Questions? Suggestions?

I'd love to hear about them!

The best place to go is the Github issue tracker for the project.