ArkScript, a small and fast language for scripting video games

ArkScript

• Documentation: Wiki
• Discord server: invite link , to discuss the specification of the language and receive help
• Modules

Nota bene: the project is referred as "Ark" and as "ArkScript". The official public name is "ArkScript" since "Ark" is already being used by another language

Key features

ArkScript is

• small: the compiler, and the virtual machines fit under 5000 lines, but also small in term of keywords (it has only 10)!
• a scripting language: it's very easy to embed it in your application. The FFI is quite easy to understand, so adding your own functions to the virtual machine is effortless
• portable: it produces a bytecode which is run by its virtual machine, like Java but without the OutOfMemoryException
• a functional language: every parameters are passed by value, everything is immutable unless you use mut to define a mutable variable
• powerful: it can handle object oriented programming in a very elegant way with its closures and explicit captures (see examples/church-encoding)
• promoting functionalities before performances: expressiveness often brings more productivity, but performances aren't bad at all
• easy to compile: it takes less than 200ms to compile and check a complex code with a lot of branches and sub-branches of 200 lines.
• a Lisp-like, but with less parentheses: [...] is expanded to (list ...) and {} to (begin ...) . More shorthands will come in the future.
• extensible: it is very easy to create a C++ module to use in the language

Also:

• it has a REPL
• it has a growing standard library, composed of ArkScript (under lib/ ) and C++ (under modules/ )
• it has a lot of unit tests, which are ran before every release to ensure everything work as intended

Examples

Fibonacci suite

{
    (let fibo (fun (n)
        (if (< n 2)
            n
            (+ (fibo (- n 1)) (fibo (- n 2))))))

    (print (fibo 28))  # display 317811
}

More or less game

{
    # more or less game
    (print "More or less game!")

    (import "librandom.so")
    (import "Math/Arithmetic.ark")

    (let number (mod (abs (random)) 10000))
    (mut value 0)
    (mut essais 0)

    (mut continue true)

    (while continue {
        (set value (toNumber (input "Input a numeric value: ")))

        (if (< value number)
            # then
            (print "More!")
            # else
            (if (= value number)
                # then
                { (print "Bingo!") (set continue false) }
                # else
                (print "Less!")))

        (set essais (+ 1 essais))})

    (print "You won in " essais " tries")
}

More examples are available in the folder examples/ .

Contributing

• First, fork the repository
• Then, clone your fork: git clone git@github.com:username/Ark.git
• Create a branch for your feature: git checkout -b feat-my-awesome-idea
• When you're done, push it to your fork and submit a pull request!

Don't know what to work on? No worries, we have a list of things to do :wink:

Our beloved contributors

Who worked on

• the standard library
  • @SuperFola
  • @Natendrtfm
  • @rinz13r
  • @FrenchMasterSword
  • @rstefanic
• the FFI
  • @SuperFola
  • @rinz13r
• the REPL
  • @rstefanic
• the CLI
  • @SuperFola
  • @DontBelieveMe
• the documentation
  • @SuperFola
  • @OfficePop
• the language specification
  • @SuperFola
  • @FrenchMasterSword
• the logo
  • Ma15fo43

Contributing to the ArkScript standard library

See Coding guidelines if you want to write ArkScript for the library (see folder lib/ ).

For performance reasons, some functions might be written in C++, in include/Ark/VM/FFI.hpp and src/VM/FFI/ .

Code structure

Dependencies

• C++17
• CMake >= 3.12
• Visual Studio >= 11 (on Windows)

Libs already included:

• rj format , MIT licence
• CLIPP , MIT licence
• termcolor , BSD (3-clause) licence
• google/benchmark , Apache 2.0 licence

Building

# first, clone it
~$ git clone --depth=50 --branch=dev https://github.com/ArkScript-lang/Ark.git
~/Ark$ cd Ark
~/Ark$ git submodule update --init --recursive
# building Ark
~/Ark$ cmake -H. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DARK_BUILD_EXE=1
~/Ark$ cmake --build build
# installing Ark
# works on Linux and on Windows (might need administrative privileges)
~/Ark$ cmake --install build --config Release
# running
~/Ark$ Ark --help
DESCRIPTION
        ArkScript programming language

SYNOPSIS
        build/Ark -h, --help
        build/Ark --version
        build/Ark --dev-info
        build/Ark ((<file> [-c]) | -r) [-(d|bcr)] [-L <lib_dir>] [-f(function-arity-check|no-function-arity-check)] [-f(allow-invalid-token-after-paren|no-invalid-token-after-paren)]

OPTIONS
        -h, --help                  Display this message
        --version                   Display ArkScript version and exit
        --dev-info                  Display development information and exit
        -c, --compile               Compile the given program to bytecode, but do not run
        -r, --repl                  Run the ArkScript REPL
        -d, --debug...              Increase debug level (default: 0)
        -bcr, --bytecode-reader     Launch the bytecode reader
        -L, --lib                   Set the location of the ArkScript standard library

        -f(function-arity-check|no-function-arity-check)
                                    Toggle function arity checks (default: ON)

        -f(allow-invalid-token-after-paren|no-invalid-token-after-paren)
                                    Authorize invalid token after `(' (default: OFF). When ON, only display a warning

LICENSE
        Mozilla Public License 2.0

Performances

Compiled on WSL (Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS 64 bits), 25 independants runs, 5 consecutives runs to have a nice median.

Run on (8 X 1992 MHz CPU s) CPU Caches:

• L1 Data 32K (x4)
• L1 Instruction 32K (x4)
• L2 Unified 262K (x4)
• L3 Unified 8388K (x1)

The test here is the Ackermann-Peter function with m=3 and n=6:

Games

You can find a snake created in ArkScript in the folder examples/games/snake (run it from there, otherwise it won't find the font and the sprites ; you won't need to install the SFML).

Controls are the arrows (left, right, up and down), the game closes itself when you successfully collect the 3 apples.

Credits

This project was inspired by gameprogramingpatterns and ofan lisp.cpp

Copyright and Licence information

Copyright (c) 2019-2020 Alexandre Plateau. All rights reserved.

This ArkScript distribution contains no GNU GPL code, which means it can be used in proprietary projects.