semrekkers / ark

Ark Programming Language

#The Ark Programming Language

Notices

For the final time, we've changed our name. We're the Ark programming language now. We had to get rid of Alloy due to some complications, and finalized on Ark. The entire discussion (which is rather long for a name change) can be found on issue #195.

Due to this name change, we've also migrated the subreddit from r/alloy_lang to r/ark_lang, go subscribe! Finally, our irc has moved from #alloy-lang to #ark-lang

We're also currently porting the backend from C to LLVM, this may take a while and things will be broken. If you want to check out the progress, have a look at issue #345.

Resources

• Reference
• Tests
• Libraries
• Contributing
• Ark Style Guide

Building

If you want to try out Ark yourself, clone the repository, compile it, and add bin/ark to your path. You can also run the test script (you'll need python) test.py to see if the tests work, though we can't guarantee they will all run successfully if you're building the nightly.

Requirements:

You will need:

• GNU Make
• Clang/GCC (we're not sure about other compilers' support)
• Python 2.4 or above (optional, for running the tests)

Compiling

$ git clone http://www.github.com/ark-lang/ark
$ cd ark
$ make

We're using LLVM by default now, so you can just run make to create the executable.

However, note that the LLVM backend is currently very incomplete, and is only recommended for development purposes. We're working as fast as possible to get it as stable as possible.

Testing

If Ark is in your $PATH:

$ ./test.py

If Ark is not in your $PATH:

$ PATH=$PATH:"./bin/" ./test.py

Just show me what it looks like already

Sure, you can either see a small virtual machine implemented in Ark here. Or you can just see a small Hello World example below:

// c binding for printf
// you have to do this for now, but soon
// we'll have a standard library for this
func printf(format: str, _): int;

func main(): int {
    printf("Hello, World");
    return 0;
}

License

Ark is licensed under the MIT License.