gst

GST is a language and vm that is small and embeddable, has metaprogramming facilities, can interoperate with C, and has enough features to make it a useful general purpose programming language. It is a modern variant of Lisp with several native useful datatypes. Some of the more interesting and useful features are first class functions and closures, immutable and mutable hashtables, arrays, and bytebuffers, macros (NYI), tail-call optimization, and continuations (coroutines, error handling). The runtime and bootstrapping compiler are written in C99, but should eventually be completely compatible with C89 compilers.

As of April 2017, still WIP. While the basic runtime is in place, as are many native functions, several important features are still being implemented and defined, like continuations and macros. These are also dependant on the compiler being ported to gst, which is ongoing. The module system is also not yet fully defined.

Currently, there is a repl for trying out the language, as well as the ability to run script files. This client program is separate from the core runtime, so gst could be embedded into other programs.

Compiling and Running

Clone the repository and run:

make run

To build the runtime and launch a repl. The GNU readline library is also required for the repl/client, but is not a dependency of the gst runtime.

Basic programs

To run some basic programs, run the client with one argument, the name of the file to run. For example, the client that is built will be located in the client directory, so running a program script.gst from the project directory would be

client/gst script.gst