kscript (ks) - ARCHIVED

NOTE: This project is no longer being actively developed or maintained, and has been archived. A spiritual successor is planned...

kscript (ks.cade.io) is a dynamic programming language with expressive syntax, cross platform support, and a rich standard library. It's like Python, but better 😉.

I wrote kscript mainly as a learning experience, to see if I could write a full programming language from scratch in C99. I did, but at what cost?

• ks.cade.io/repl - online REPL with WASM
  • Run kscript in your browser!
• ks.cade.io - online documentation
  • A full documentation of the language and standard library, including examples

Usage

Online REPL via WASM

To quickly test out kscript, run it online at ks.cade.io. This is a REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) that runs locally in your browser using WebAssembly (WASM).

Running Locally

To run kscript locally, download a pre-built binary from the releases page for your platform.

When you unarchive it, you should see a bin/ folder with the ks executable inside. You can run it like so:

$ ./bin/ks -c 'print(1+2+3+4)'
10

Setup

If you want to build it yourself, or check out how development works, follow these instructions for your platform:

Setup: Linux

First, install the required dependencies for your system:

# on Debian/Ubuntu/apt-based Linux systems
$ sudo apt install libpthread-stubs0-dev libgmp-dev libreadline-dev libfftw3-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libffi-dev

# others: figure it out!

Now, configure the build system to find these dependencies:

# run with --help for more options
$ ./configure --with-readline --with-ffi --with-pthreads --with-libav --with-opengl --with-glfw --prefix $PWD/install

And finally, build the entire project with:

# use -j<N> to parallelize the build with N jobs
$ make -j16

Optionally, you can also "install" it to the location specified with --prefix above:

$ make install

Setup: MacOS

First, install the required dependencies for your system using Homebrew (install Homebrew if you haven't already):

$ brew install libffi ffmpeg glfw

Next, we need to add these libraries to our path, so they are found by our configuration system:

# add the library path, where dynamic libraries are found
$ export LIBRARY_PATH="$LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/homebrew/lib:/opt/homebrew/opt/libffi/lib"

# add the include path, where C/C++ header files are found
$ export C_INCLUDE_PATH="$C_INCLUDE_PATH:/opt/homebrew/include:/opt/homebrew/opt/libffi/include"

With those set, we can now configure kscript to find these libraries:

$ ./configure --with-readline --with-ffi --with-pthreads --with-libav --with-opengl --with-glfw

And finally, build the entire project with:

# use -j<N> to parallelize the build with N jobs
$ make -j16

Optionally, you can also "install" it to the location specified with --prefix above:

$ make install

Setup: Emscripten (WASM)

You can also build WASM binaries using Emscripten (a great project, BTW). This allows you to run kscript in the browser, or anywhere that supports WebAssembly.

First, install Emscripten by following their instructions: Emscripten: Getting Started. You should install and activate their SDK.

For example, to install v4.0.15 (which is comfirmed to work with kscript), you can run:

$ git clone https://github.com/emscripten-core/emsdk.git
$ cd emsdk
$ ./emsdk install 4.0.15
$ ./emsdk activate 4.0.15
$ source ./emsdk_env.sh

Now, configure the build system to use Emscripten, which requires manually overriding some environment variables:

$ CC=emcc CFLAGS="-O3 -Wno-ignored-attributes -sASSERTIONS=1" LDFLAGS='-O3 -sWASM=1 -sASSERTIONS=1 -sERROR_ON_UNDEFINED_SYMBOLS=0 -sEXPORTED_RUNTIME_METHODS=["cwrap","ccall","stringToUTF8","UTF8ToString"]' PLATFORM="web" ./configure


Finally, you can build the same way as native builds:

```shell
# use -j<N> to parallelize the build with N jobs
$ make -j16

Setup: Windows

Windows was never really fully supported, but can be built with the Visual Studio solution project in the ./winbuild folder.

Good luck!

Running

# the most basic program
$ ./bin/ks examples/greet.ks
hello, <user>

# compute a Fibonacci number (the 10th in this example)
$ ./bin/ks examples/fib.ks 10
55

Making Documentation

Inside the docs/ folder, you can run:

$ pandoc DOCS.md -o index.html --template template.html -s --toc --number-sections --lua-filter=pandoc/anchors.lua --syntax-highlighting=none

And, to generate a PDF copy:

$ pandoc DOCS.md -o kscript.pdf -s --toc --number-sections --pdf-engine=xelatex -V geometry:a4paper -V geometry:margin=2cm -V fontsize=12pt

TODO for final release

• implement sum/min/max functions
• implement display in REPL with backslash-escaped printing