Loxiest

What is Loxiest

A dynamically typed, interpreted language compiled and executed on its own virtual machine.

It aims to compatible with Bob Nystrom's Lox implementation in C.

This imlpementation uses a mark-and-sweep garbage collector. It also supports nan-boxing as an optional feature. While this has resulted in noticable improvements on x64 architectures, it may less effective or might even be slower to use on ARM64 architectures such as Apple Silicon.

Installation

Stable binaries are available on the releases page.

Usage

Running the REPL

./loxiest

Running a file

./loxiest <filename>.lox

Features

Loxiest comes with a disassembler and a trace execution printing. To enable these features, follow the development guide and enable the features within the Cargo.toml file or on the command line for a single run.

Cargo.toml

edit the default features line:

[features]
default = ["debug-trace-execution", "debug-print-code", "nan-boxing"]

CLI

To run a single feature:

cargo run --release --features "debug-print-code" # or whatever feature

To run all features:

cargo run --release --all-features

Development

To download and develop on Loxiest, clone the repository and build using Cargo. Cargo, as well as Rust can be installed via rustup.

Once downloaded, navigate to the project root directory and run:

cargo build --release

Documentation

TODO. Someday. Maybe. Or read the code.

Notes

The benchmark examples are copied from the craftinginterpreters repository and are under the MIT License.

License

MIT License - Copyright (c) 2024 Abdulrazzaq Alhendi.