This is the Spry language, inspired by Rebol/Smalltalk/Self/Forth and Nim. Characteristics:
- A dynamically typed minimalistic language with a free form syntax similar to Rebol/Forth
- Parser produces an AST which in turn is interpreted by the interpreter
- Functional in nature and has closures and non local return
- Homoiconic which means code and data has the same form
- Meant to be 100% live and support interactive development
Here are my articles about Spry
- You find ideas in Rebol/Ren/Red interesting but would like something different :)
- You love Smalltalk but can imagine a simplified similar language and want to play with multicore or small platforms and more easily use the C/C++/Nim eco system
- You love Nim but want to have a dynamic language running inside Nim
- You find Spry cool and would like to port it to another host language
- ...or you just love freaky programming language ideas!
Spry only depends on Nim, so it should work fine on Windows, OSX, Linux etc, but for the moment I only use Linux for Spry development. The shell scripts will probably be rewritten in nimscript and thus everything can be fully cross platform - feel free to help me with that!
Included is a VagrantFile for Ubuntu 18.04. If you have vagrant just do vagrant up
and vagrant ssh
into it to find spry installed. Test with ispry
- the "interactive spry" REPL, or spry --version
.
The following commands can get you running inside LXC very quickly, tested on Ubuntu 19.04:
Start a Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa, LTS) LXC machine and login to it:
lxc launch ubuntu:20.04 spry
lxc exec spry -- su --login ubuntu
Install dependencies, Nim and eventually Spry itself. Note that this is not a minimal Spry but one that includes RocksDB, GUI, Python wrapper etc:
sudp apt update
sudo apt install gcc pkg-config libgtk-3-dev librocksdb-dev libpython2.7
curl https://nim-lang.org/choosenim/init.sh -sSf | sh
export PATH=/home/ubuntu/.nimble/bin:$PATH
echo "export PATH=/home/ubuntu/.nimble/bin:$PATH" >> .profile
nimble refresh
nimble install spry
Then make sure Spry works:
ubuntu@spry:~$ spry --version
Spry 0.8.0
ubuntu@spry:~$ spry -e "echo (3 + 4)"
7
ubuntu@spry:~$ ispry
Welcome to interactive Spry!
An empty line will evaluate previous lines, so hit enter twice.
>>> 3 + 4
>>>
7
Thales Macedo Garitezi also made a Docker image for testing out the Spry REPL (ispry):
- Github: https://github.com/thalesmg/docker-spry
- Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/thalesmg/spry/
You can run it like this (with or without sudo):
docker run --rm -it thalesmg/spry
...and that should get you into the REPL.
The following should work on a Ubuntu/Debian, adapt accordingly for other distros.
-
Get GCC and Nim! I recommend using choosenim or just following the official instructions. Using choosenim it's as simple as:
sudo apt install gcc pkg-config libgtk-3-dev librocksdb-dev libpython2.7 curl https://nim-lang.org/choosenim/init.sh -sSf | sh
-
Clone this repo. Then run
nimble install
in it. That should hopefully end up withspry
andispry
built and in your path. You can also just runnimble install spry
but then you have no access to examples etc in this git repository. -
Try with say
spry --version
orspry -e "echo (3 + 4)"
. And you can also try the REPL withispry
.
So now that you have installed Spry, you can proceed to play with the examples in the examples
directory, see README in there for details.
The following should work on OSX.
-
Install Homebrew unless you already have it.
-
Get Nim! I recommend using choosenim or just following the official instructions. Using choosenim it's as simple as:
curl https://nim-lang.org/choosenim/init.sh -sSf | sh
You can also use brew (although not sure how good it follows Nim releases):
brew install nim
3. Install extra dependencies, at the moment Rocksdb is one:
brew install rocksdb
4. Clone this repo. Then run nimble install
in it. That should hopefully end up with spry
and ispry
built and in your path. You can also just run nimble install spry
but then you have no access to examples etc in this git repository.
- Try with say
spry --version
orspry -e "echo (3 + 4)"
. And you can also try the REPL withispry
.
So now that you have installed Spry, you can proceed to play with the examples in the examples
directory, see README in there for details.
You can "cheat" and try out Spry using a zip with binaries.
-
First you want to have git installed, and ideally with the unix utilities included so that some of the basic unix commands work on the Windows Command prompt.
-
Install Nim using binaries. Just follow the instructions and make sure to answer yes to include the directories in the PATH as finish.exe asks you if you want. NOTE: Currently using Choosenim on Windows will produce a 32 bit Nim and Spry, even on a 64 bit Windows, so I don't recommend Choosenim on Windows just yet.
-
There are no dependencies other than some dlls that are included in the Nim bin directory.
-
Clone this repo. Then run
nimble install
in it. That should hopefully end up withspry
andispry
built and in your path. You can also just runnimble install spry
but then you have no access to examples etc in this git repository. -
Try with say
spry --version
orspry -e "echo (3 + 4)"
. And you can also try the REPL withispry
.
So now that you have installed Spry, you can proceed to play with the examples in the examples
directory, see README in there for details.
-
If you want to build the interpreter manually, go into
src
and runnim c -d:release spry
to build the Spry interpreter, ornim c -d:release ispry
for the REPL. It should produce a single binary each. That's the standard invocation to build a nim program in release mode. -
Then go into examples and look at
hello.sy
as the next mandatory step :). Its simply Spry source being run by thespry
executable interpreter using the "shebang" trick. -
Then you can cd into bench and run
bench.sh
which starts by building the standalone Spry interpreter and then use it to runfactorial.sy
which is a program that calculatesfactorial 12
100k times. It takes 2.7 seconds on my laptop which is quite slow, about 6x slower than Rebol3, 20x slower than Python and 100x slower than Pharo Smalltalk. :) You can runcompare.sh
to see yourself. With a bit of work removing unneeded silly stuff in the interpreter it should be reasonable to reach Rebol3 in performance. -
Ok, so at this point you want to learn a bit more how Spry works. Not much material around yet since its evolving but you can:
- On Linux or OSX you should be able to build a trivial "IDE", see below.
- Look at
tests/*.nim
which is a series of low level Spry code snippets and expected output. - Look at the various
examples
- Try running
tutorial1.sy
in tutorials, which is just showing we can do interactive tutorials with the repl - Try out the interactive REPL by running
ispry
- And of course, read the source code
spryvm.nim
. Its hopefully not that messy.
There is also a beginning of a Spry VM module (src/modules/spryrawui.nim) for making GUI stuff using the excellent libui project. A small trivial little IDE written in Spry itself exists and you can build it on Linux or OSX.
- OSX: Just run
./makeideosx.sh
insrc
and if you are lucky that produces a binary file calledideosx
. Try running it with./ideosx
. - Linux: Just run
./makeide.sh
insrc
and if you are lucky that produces a binary file calledide
. Try running it with./ide
.
Spry started out as a Rebol inspired interpreter - since I felt the homoiconicity of Rebol was interesting to experiment with. Lispish, but not insanely filled with parenthesis :)
Then I started sliding towards Smalltalk when I added both support for infix arguments (so that a "receiver" can be on the left, similar to Nim), and later even keyword syntax for functions taking multiple arguments. I also changed func definitions to be more light weight (compared to Rebol) like Smalltalk blocks.
Spry is meant to mix with Nim. The idea is to use Nim for heavy lifting and binding with the outside world, and then let Spry be a 100% live dynamically typed language inside Nim. Spry will stay a very small language, but hopefully useful.
And oh, this is just for fun and I am not a good Nim hacker nor a language implementor. :)