Introduction

Stem aims to be a minimal interpreted stack based programming language that allows for metaprogramming and a foreign language interface. It features a C API that is elegant and simple. Additionally, garbage collection is not needed in this language as the responsibility of writing memory safe operations is put in the hands of the maintainers of the builtin functions and FLI library maintainers. Therefore, the end user does not need to worry about memory allocation while the implementation remains extremely simple.

Motivation

This language was designed after I heard about stack based programming languages from my friend Matthew Hinton. I made it according to his description, and made choices along the way in the design process according to what I thought was logical.

Installation

In the terminal:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ret2pop/stem
cd stem/
make
sudo make install

To generate the html documentation, one must first install doxygen as an optional dependency. If you are on a BSD or MacOS, you must use gmake. Also, you obviously need git to clone this repository.

Documentation

See the Doxygen generated documentation for the C API documentation and my blog post.

Task List

• Write a library for stem to test the FLI
• Write a line editor with said library
• ed clone with stem configuration
• Stem to C transpiler (In progress on local branch)
• Stem compiler for other lower level backends

and of course, the ever-present:

• fix all bugs