dst

Dst is a general purpose functional programming language and bytecode interpreter. The syntax resembles lisp (and the language does inherit a lot from lisp), but lists are replaced by other data structures with better utility and performance (arrays, tables, structs, tuples). The language can also easily bridge to native code, and supports abstract datatypes for interfacing with C. Also support meta programming with macros. The bytecode vm is a register based vm loosely inspired by the LuaJIT bytecode format.

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 dst could be embedded into other programs.

Implemented in mostly standard C99, dst runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. The few features that are not standard C (dynamic library loading, compiler specific optimizations), are fairly straight forward. Dst can be easily ported to new platforms.

Features

• First class closures
• Garbage collection
• First class green threads (continuations)
• Mutable and immutable arrays (array/tuple)
• Mutable and immutable hashtables (table/struct)
• Mutable and immutable strings (buffer/string)
• Lisp Macros
• Byte code interpreter with an assembly interface, as well as bytecode verification
• Proper tail calls.
• Direct interop with C via abstract types and C functions
• Dynamically load C libraries
• Lexical scoping
• REPL

Usage

A repl is launched when the binary is invoked with no arguments. Pass the -h flag to display the usage information.

$ ./dst
Dst 0.0.0 alpha  Copyright (C) 2017-2018 Calvin Rose
> (+ 1 2 3)
6
> (print "Hello, World!")
Hello, World!
nil
> (exit)
$ ./dst -h
usage: ./dst [options] scripts...
Options are:
-h Show this help
-v Print the version string
-r Enter the repl after running all scripts
$

Compiling and Running

Dst is built using CMake. There used to be a hand-written Makefile, but in the interest of easier Windows support I have switched to CMake.

On a posix system using make, compiling and running is as follows (this is the same as most CMake based projects).

Build

cd somewhere/my/projects/dst
mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make
make test

The repl can also be run with the CMake run target.

make run

Examples

See the examples directory for some example dst code.

Editor

There is some preliminary vim syntax highlighting in dst.vim. Generic lisp synatx highlighting should provide good results, however.