mal-rust

MAL is a Joel Martin project consisting in a set of instructions to build a LISP interpreter in any Turing-complete programming language. This projects implements a LISP interpreter following the instructions from the MAL repository but totally adapted to Rust.

MAL original project has lot of impressive generic code to allow a uniform experience implementing the intepreter in any programming language, but this is out of scope for this project. As all that code is excessive for a single implementation, this project builds a language specific version of MAL. You can think of it as a implementation of MAL as if it were intended to be written only in a programming language.

The project follows a linear path, tagging the master branch with the steps, but working only with one source code (not one for step). Some tests are performed in Rust and can be run using cargo. Otherwise, the MAL runtest script can be used with the test files copied to this repository.

Usage

To use mal-rust, compile and run with cargo

cargo build --release
cargo run

or install it and run it by its name

mal-rust

Tests

Rust tests

The rust tests are translated from original mal project tests to rust to be run with cargo.

Run basic tests with

cargo test

Some tests (like tests to check print statements) need the --nocapture flat. To run them, execute:

cargo test -- --nocapture --include-ignored

Mal tests

To run mal tests, the original runtest.py and mal project tests are included in this project. To execute them, from the projects root execute:

python3 runtest.py mal-tests/<STEP-N>.mal -- path/to/executable

For example, to run step 6 tests with the release executable, run:

cargo build --release
python3 runtest.py mal-tests/step6_file.mal -- target/release/mal-rust

To run all tests, you can use shell regex as in this example:

for test in $(ls mal-tests/step[2-9A]*); do
    python3 runtest.py $test -- target/debug/mal-rust
    sleep 2
done

Self-hosting tests

From the original mal project, inside the mal implementation folder (impls/mal/) run:

for file in $(ls ../mal/step[0-9A]*.mal); do
    file=$(basename ${file})
    python3 ../../runtest.py ../tests/${file} -- /path/to/mal-rust ../mal/${file}
    sleep 1;
done

You may need to change the path to core.mal in main.rs to an absolute path to be able to run mal-rust from everywhere.

Project status

This project has been finished. In it's last version, is able to run all tests, self-host the MAL interpretation and also run all tests with it (except the metadata deferrable feature).