Ven

Beware! Despite the serious look (hopefully!), Ven is just a hobby project I work on from time to time.

This repository contains a reference interpreter for the Ven programming language. Ven is lightweight, slick and elegant; it is inspired mostly by Perl (and Raku), JavaScript, Python and Lisp (yes, Lisp!)

Building Ven

1. Clone this repo.

With Docker:

A Docker buildimage is shipped with Ven.

2. Run docker build -t venlang .;
3. Run docker run --rm -v $(pwd)/bin:/build/bin venlang;
4. The executable will be in bin/. If you ran Docker as root, you might want to chown the executable: sudo chown <your-user> bin/ven.

Without Docker:

2. Run shards install --ignore-crystal-version;
3. Run shards build --release --no-debug --production.

Also, make sure to install Inquirer. Otherwise, distinct and expose statements won't work.

You can strip the executable to reduce its size (goes down to about 5M).

Using Ven

Note that:

1. Ven is not ready enough for experimental use.
2. Ven is never going to be ready for production.

First, you have to start Inquirer:

1. /path/to/bin/inquirer start -d starts Inquirer in detached mode, i.e., as a daemon that will run in the background; Omit the -d flag if you want to see what the server is doing, live.
2. You can see what Inquirer is up to by the means of its interactive shell (/path/to/bin/inquirer shell), too. Type ping into the prompt, and you'll hopefully see pong;
3. You can quit from the Inquirer shell by pressing CTRL+D;
4. It is not recommended to leave Inquirer running in background for too long (who knows what leaks there may be!). To stop Inquirer, you can run /path/to/bin/inquirer stop, or use the die command from the interactive shell.

Second, try to run Ven:

1. Run /path/to/bin/ven sanity -t. If it worked with no errors, you have successfully built Ven. Moreover, Ven itself had a proper interaction with the running instance of Inquirer! If there was a boom, though, make sure Inquirer's running and, if things still fall apart, file a bug here or in the Inquirer repository (choose as you wish).
2. If you want to play with Ven through an interactive prompt, run /path/to/bin/ven.
3. If you want to see what's going on under the hood, pass -j (or --just) flag (ven -j <...>). It halts Ven at the specified stage of the interpretation process. Try -j read, -j compile and -j optimize. If you don't know what to type, type 1 + 1 🙂
4. Use /path/to/bin/ven path/to/file.ven to run a file. Try ven examples/calculator.ven. The -j flag works here, too, and ven -j optimize examples/calculator.ven dumps on you the optimized bytecode — as expected.

Contributing

1. Fork it;
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature);
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature');
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature);
5. Create a new Pull Request.