quest VS passerine

In order to help others' languages that looked fun, I decided to implement a new language that works alongside Paka. A free little language called Quest, made by a friend by the name of sampersand. It was had performance than the implementation they made, though had much head room to improve. It ended up not working out in the end, but it was a fun way to test my language's capability and try to improve quest as a language.

It's still a long way from being complete, but I'm working on something like that[0]. Eventual plans are to have good Rust library interop (e.g. bindings to hyper for http) while also being able to compile to Wasm (to run on an erlang-style distributed runtime / the browser). The language is currently interpreted, but one I get typechecking working, I should be able to merge in the Wasm codegen backend I'm working on (with eventual plans for LLVM). Current compiler has zero external dependencies.

Language itself could be described as a mix of OCaml, Scheme, and Lua. Currently working on the hygienic procedural macro system and system injection through algebraic effects.

[0]: https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine

Passerine was the next language i decided to try to fit onto paka, but alas this one too was eventually put aside for the time being.

Tossing my hat in for Passerine [1]. Gorgeous ML inspired syntax. Built for scripting Rust applications.

Dreaming here: Lua is a fantastic scripting language, but the Rust FFI isn’t as ergonomic as it could be. Enter Luster [2], which is basically LuaJIT rewritten in Rust.

Embedding a scripting language in a Rust application gives you tons of power (e.g. scripting Rust structs from Lua [3]), and setting this up isn’t terribly difficult.

[1] https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine

[2]: https://github.com/kyren/luster

[3]: https://git.sr.ht/~ioiojo/kiwi

Seed7 and https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine (and seemingly more as others have suggested) have direct / first-class support of syntax declaration/definition in a homoiconic way, as powerful as LISPs, but feels more "natural" compared to a LISP.

It used to work pretty well only if the core PL makes semicolons programmable, but given the development of effect systems, plus customizable syntax as in https://github.com/ThomasMertes/seed7 and https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine , I'd say, there are much more we can do about it.

git clone https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine