bizarrecake/arane

An experimental Perl 6 bytecode compiler/interpreter.

Arane

Arane is a bytecode compiler and interpreter for the Perl 6 language written in C++11 that I am currently working on.

Features

The compiler is still in its early infancy, and so there's not a lot in it yet. But the following is currently supported:

• Simple type constraints
• Arrays, strings, and big integers.
• 'if' statement.
• 'while', 'loop', and 'for' loop statements.
• Basic subroutines (with optionally typed parameters and return value)
• Packages and modules (all subroutines are exported at the moment)
• A simple incremental mark-sweep garbage collector.

Here's a small code snippet that computes and prints the factorial of 100:

package Foo {
  
  # Computes N'th factorial.
  sub fact (int $n --> Int) {
    $n <= 1 ?? 1 !! $n * fact($n - 1)
  }
}

say Foo::fact 100;

Compiling and Running

To compile Arane, you will need a relatively new GCC C++ compiler with support for C++11, and a copy of CMake. In the project's root directory, type:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles"
make

The resulting executable could be then found inside the newly created build directory (named arane). To run a Perl file, type:

./arane <file>

And that's it!