Monkey Lang, implemented in Zig!

Monkey is a programming language built by hand, solely for educational purposes. If you are interested in learning how to write a language yourself, please check out this link for more information.

Features

Monkey includes:

• integers
• booleans
• strings
• functions as expressions (closures)
• if-else control flow
• implicit and explicit returns

Build Instructions

First, you must install Zig. You can find instructions here.

Next, run:

zig build install

This will compile the source code into an executable. It can be found at zig-out/bin/monkey-lang. You can execute it in a terminal, and it will launch into an interactive REPL. As a shortcut to compile and launch into the REPL directly, run:

zig build run

If you want to use a file for your input, simply add a relative path to the file as a CLI argument:

zig-out/bin/monkey-lang input.txt

The same shortcut can be used for files:

zig build run -- input.txt

Advanced Use Case

For user who want an improved user experience, you can link the GNU Readline library into the REPL by adding the -Denable_readline flag:

zig build run -Denable_readline

You can find GNU Readline library instructions here.