Owl Lisp -- a purely functional scheme
Copyright (c) 2016 Aki Helin
OVERVIEW
~~~~~~~~
Owl Lisp is a functtional dialect of the Scheme programming language. It
is mainly based on applicative subset of the R7RS standard.
REQUIREMENTS
~~~~~~~~~~~~
You should have make and gcc or clang installed.
INSTALLATION
~~~~~~~~~~~~
To install system-wide to /usr
$ make
$ sudo make install
Alternatively you can try it out with
$ make
$ cp bin/ol /somewhere/convenient
$ /somewhere/convenient/ol
You see a prompt
>
FILES
~~~~~~
bin/ol - the owl interpreter/compiler
c/ovm.c - the virtual machine / shared owl lisp runtime
owl/*.scm - implementation of owl repl and compiler
bench/*.scm - some benchmarks
fasl/*.fasl - bytecode images for bin/vm used during boot
bin/vm - plain VM used during boot
c/ol.c - combined VM and REPL heap image
USAGE
~~~~~
Owl can be used either interactively, or to interpret code from files,
or compile programs to fasl-images or c-files. The difference between
an owl program and a plain script is that the program should just have
a function of one argument as the last value, which will be called with
the command line argument list when the program is executed.
In addition to being a regular interpreter, owl also tries to make it
easy to compile programs for different platforms. Owl programs can be
compiled with ol to C-files, which can be compiled to standalone binaries
without needing any owl-specific support files or libraries. The C files
also work on 32- and 64-bit systems, and compile as such at least on
Linux, OpenBSD, OSX and can be crosscompiled to Windows executables with
MinGW.
For example, to build a hello world program:
$ echo '(lambda (args) (print "Hello, world!"))' > hello.scm
$ ol -o hello.c hello.scm
$ gcc -o hello hello.c
$ ./hello
Hello, world!
Or simply:
$ echo '(λ (args) (print "Hello, world!"))' \
| ol -x c | gcc -x c -o hello - && ./hello
Parts of the compiled programs can be translated to C, instead of being
simply fasl-encoded, to increase speed. Using the --native flag compiles
most of the bytecode to C, and --usual-suspects compiles typically used
functions. To make programs run faster, one can use for example:
$ ol -O2 -o test.c test.scm && gcc -O2 -o test test.c
UPDATES AND DOCUMENTATION
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For further documentation and updates, see:
https://haltp.org/n/10
https://github.com/aoh/owl-lisp