• Documentation: Wiki

Nota bene: the project is referred as "Ark" and as "ArkScript". The official public name is "ArkScript" since "Ark" is already being used by another language

ArkScript is

• small: the compiler, and the virtual machines fit under 5000 lines, but also small in term of keywords (it has only 10)!
• a scripting language: it's very easy to embed it in your application. The FFI is quite easy to understand, so adding your own functions to the virtual machine is effortless
• portable: it produces a bytecode which is run by its virtual machine, like Java but without the OutOfMemoryException
• a functional language: every parameters are passed by value, everything is immutable unless you use mut to define a mutable variable
• powerful: it can handle object oriented programming in a very elegant way with its closures and explicit captures (see examples/church-encoding)
• promoting functionalities before performances: expressiveness often brings more productivity, but performances aren't bad at all
• easy to compile: it takes less than 200ms to compile and check a complex code with a lot of branches and sub-branches of 200 lines.
• a Lisp-like, but with less parentheses: [...] is expanded to (list ...) and {} to (begin ...). More shorthands will come in the future.

Also:

• it has a REPL
• it has a growing standard library, composed of ArkScript (under lib/) and C++ (under modules/)
• it has a lot of unit tests, which are ran before every release to ensure everything work as intended

{
    (let fibo (fun (n)
        (if (< n 2)
            n
            (+ (fibo (- n 1)) (fibo (- n 2))))))

    (print (fibo 28))  # display 317811
}

{
    # more or less game
    (print "More or less game!")

    (import "librandom.so")
    (import "Arithmetic.ark")

    (let number (mod (abs (random)) 10000))
    (mut value 0)
    (mut essais 0)

    (mut continue true)

    (while continue {
        (set value (toNumber (input "Input a numeric value: ")))

        (if (< value number)
            # then
            (print "More!")
            # else
            (if (= value number)
                # then
                { (print "Bingo!") (set continue false) }
                # else
                (print "Less!")))

        (set essais (+ 1 essais))})

    (print "You won in" essais "tries")
}

More examples are available in the folder examples/.

• First, fork the repository
• Then, clone your fork: git clone [email protected]:username/Ark.git
• Create a branch for your feature: git checkout -b feat-my-awesome-idea
• When you're done, push it to your fork and submit a pull request!

Don't know what to work on? No worries, we have a list of things to do 😉

See Coding guidelines if you want to write ArkScript for the library (see folder lib/).

For performance reasons, some functions might be written in C++, in include/Ark/VM/FFI.hpp and src/VM/FFI/.

• C++17
• CMake >= 3.12
• Visual Studio >= 11 (on Windows)

Libs already included:

• rj format, MIT licence
• CLIPP, MIT licence
• termcolor, BSD (3-clause) licence
• google/benchmark, Apache 2.0 licence

# first, clone it
~$ git clone --depth=50 --branch=dev https://github.com/SuperFola/Ark.git
~/Ark$ cd Ark
~/Ark$ git submodule update --init --recursive
# building Ark
~/Ark$ cmake -H. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DARK_BUILD_EXE=1
~/Ark$ cmake --build build
# installing Ark
# works on Linux and on Windows (might need administrative privileges)
~/Ark$ cmake --install build --config Release
# running
~/Ark$ Ark --help
DESCRIPTION
        ArkScript programming language

SYNOPSIS
        build/Ark -h, --help
        build/Ark --version
        build/Ark --dev-info
        build/Ark (<file>|-r, --repl) [-(d|bcr)] [-L, --lib <lib_dir>] [-f(function-arity-check|no-function-arity-check)] [-f(allow-invalid-token-after-paren|no-invalid-token-after-paren)]

OPTIONS
        -h, --help                  Display this message
        --version                   Display ArkScript version and exit
        --dev-info                  Display development information and exit
        -r, --repl                  Run the ArkScript REPL
        -d, --debug                 Enable debug mode
        -bcr, --bytecode-reader     Launch the bytecode reader
        -L, --lib                   Set the location of the ArkScript standard library

        -f(function-arity-check|no-function-arity-check)
                                    Toggle function arity checks (default: ON)

        -f(allow-invalid-token-after-paren|no-invalid-token-after-paren)
                                    Authorize invalid token after `(' (default: OFF). When ON, only display a warning

LICENSE
        Mozilla Public License 2.0

The project was compiled on Linux Mint 18 x64, with g++ 8 and -DNDEBUG -O3 -s.

The test here is the Ackermann-Peter function with m=3 and n=6:

2019-10-08 19:46:02
Running benchmark/vm
Run on (4 X 2400 MHz CPU s)
CPU Caches:
  L1 Data 32K (x2)
  L1 Instruction 32K (x2)
  L2 Unified 256K (x2)
  L3 Unified 3072K (x1)
Load Average: 0.94, 1.25, 0.86
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Benchmark                         Time             CPU   Iterations
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Ackermann_3_6_ark_mean          133 ms          133 ms           25
Ackermann_3_6_ark_median        133 ms          133 ms           25
Ackermann_3_6_ark_stddev      0.694 ms        0.694 ms           25

Ackermann_3_6_cpp_mean        0.370 ms        0.370 ms           25
Ackermann_3_6_cpp_median      0.368 ms        0.368 ms           25
Ackermann_3_6_cpp_stddev      0.004 ms        0.004 ms           25

Comparison with Java using OpenJDK 11.0.3 x64 (source code here):

Mean time: 651.28us
Median time: 622us
Stddev: 119.49792299450229us

Comparison with Python 3.6.7 (source code here):

Mean time: 36.2155839279294ms
Median time: 35.600485280156136ms
Stddev: 0.8867313499129518ms

Comparison with Lua 5.1.5 (source code here):

Mean time: 13.244432 ms
Median time: 13.214 ms
Stddev: 0.30360220508642ms

You can find a snake created in ArkScript in the folder examples/games/snake (run it from there, otherwise it won't find the font and the sprites ; you won't need to install the SFML).

Controls are the arrows (left, right, up and down), the game closes itself when you successfully collect the 3 apples.

This project was inspired by gameprogramingpatterns and ofan lisp.cpp

Huge thanks to

• @Natendrtfm (standard library)
• @rstefanic (REPL)
• @rinz13r (FFI, standard library)
• @OfficePop (wiki)
• @FrenchMasterSword (language specification)

Copyright (c) 2019 Alexandre Plateau. All rights reserved.

This ArkScript distribution contains no GNU GPL code, which means it can be used in proprietary projects.