The latria language

Sept. 26th, 2022 - Just a small note. This project hasn't been worked on recently for some time, as I've been quite busy. While I'm still quite happy with it (and plan to come back to it at a later time) please keep this in mind. I would not recommend Latria for projects beyond the educational domain at this time.

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A compact, cross platform, embeddable language with an emphasis on multi-language communication and lightweight scripting.

What's neat about latria?

• can run on mac/linux/windows/android/ios and more (almost anything since 1990, give or take).
• a very tiny footprint. The compiler and interpreter combined weighs in at ~150kb on unix systems, and about ~250kb on windows.
• it's fast. And it can be optimized to go even faster.
• scripts can be compiled in advance and are system agnostic. A script built by latria on windows can be run by latria on mac, linux, ios, etc.
• very few dependencies, making it easy to build from scratch for your systems specifically.
• can capture the results of another language, allowing you to 'glue' together individual programs/scripts/etc. written in multiple different languages with ease.
• embedding it won't bloat your existing project.
• licensed under the MIT open source license

Getting Started

The latest release has binaries for mac, linux and windows. These precombiled versions will work in most cases, provided you have a compatible operating system. If you need something a little more custom you can always build latria from source by following the building instructions below.

Be sure to read the guide to familiarize yourself with the latria language.

If you want to see runnable examples checkouts the examples folder included in this repo. It contains scripts various scripts that you can play around with to learn how latria works.

Building

Latria is capable of being built on linux, mac and windows from the same source. The methods vary however, as will be explained in a moment.

To note latria does not use the standard ./configure, make, make install approach. Instead you run make [platform] and make install. Note that if you're not sure what's available to 'make' you can always run make help

For building on mac you can invoke make as follows.

make mac

For linux you can invoke make the same way, but for linux.

make linux

Now for windows there is an alternate Makefile provided specially for nmake. You can invoke it and build for windows as follows. Note that you will need to install Visual Studio and have access to a Developer Command Prompt to use nmake.

nmake /F NMakefile latria

For building on the 'big 3' that's essentially all you have to do! For issues or questions regarding those platforms, or any others, feel free to open an issue or submit a PR.

Testing

Testing on Latria is currently run by an embedded suite of tests. You can run them using make as follows:

mac & linux

# clean if needed
make clean

# build and run just the tests
make mac-test
## OR ##
make linux-test

You can run a more comprehensive test on mac/linux as follows:

# clean if you built before
make clean

# build and run the tests, as well as try all builds
make mac-test-all
### OR ###
make linux-test-all

windows

:: clean if needed
nmake /F NMakefile clean

:: run tests
nmake /F NMakefile test

You can run a more comprehensive test on windows as follows:

:: clean if needed
nmake /F NMakefile clean

:: run tests and try all builds
nmake /F NMakefile test-all

If you're having issues with latria consider using valgrind to profile a debuggable build. I highly recommend it, and this will often quickly point you in the right direction. You can make a debuggable build on mac/linux as follows:

make mac-debug
### OR ###
make linux-debug

# note that a debuggable build with the compiler and interpreter 
# can run it's own tests by passing -t
# it's how 'make test' runs the tests as well
./build/latria-debug -t

And for windows:

nmake /F NMakefile latria-debug

:: note that this deggable build with the compiler and interpreter
:: can also run it's own tests by passing -t
build\latria-debug.exe -t

Contributing

If you plan to contribute please read Contributing first.

If you have suggestions or improvements you may submit a pull request to have a feature or bug fix integrated into the language.