Bhuna is a small, garbage-collected language with a simple syntax, closures, inferred types, lightweight processes, and support for UTF-8 source code.
It was implemented partly to see how closely I could match the performance of Lua's interpreter.
It is not well-specified; it was designed more-or-less by fiat of building
the interpreter. I originally wrote it on FreeBSD, while figuring out how
to implement closures (the hard way.) So for the longest time, building it
required BSD make and the associated support files from FreeBSD. Now,
however, it has a self-contained Makefile and can be built with GNU make.
It is also now covered under a BSD-style license; see the file LICENSE.
The Bhuna project is basically dead. See Kosheri for a virtual machine that sprang from its ashes.