Huia

Welcome to Huia.

Huia, is a programming language targetting the Rubinius VM.

Huia is a whitespace-aware dynamic language with a simple object model based around traditional inheritance and closures.

Huia only has a few (global) constants for core types (such as Object, Closure. Integer, etc). Everything else can be made by subclassing these core types.

In addition to these two core types there are two other constants available in the environment:

Huia which provides access to runtime features (at this stage only requireFile: and requireCore:).
Ruby which implements a simple object proxy allowing you to encapsulate a Ruby object and send and receive messages from them. You will see that a large amount of the standard library is implemented this way as it evolves.

A simple example:

Stdout = Huia.requireCore: 'stdout'

HelloWhom = Object.extend:

  def: 'hello:' as: |whom|
    Stdout.putString: "Hello #{whom}"

helloWhom = HelloWhom.create
helloWhom.hello: "world"

Further documentation is available on the GitHub Wiki.

Status

Installation

Huia is distributed as a Rubygem, as such you can either place gem "huia" in your Gemfile or run bundle install huia. Huia will only run on Rubinius version 2.3.0 and greater. Sorry, but if you don't have a recent Rubinius installed, it's not going to work for you.

Usage

You can run Huia scripts using the bundled huia binary or interactively using the interactive REPL, hirb.

Documentation

Further documentation is available on the GitHub Wiki.

Extinction of the Huia

Melodious as its Māori name, the gentle Huia bird seems a fowl lost from an ancient bestiary.

Always in pairs, their life one long low liquid interchange, they rarely flew, but hopped and probed in deepest thickets preening and balancing, antiphonal.

They fed upon the luscious huhu grub under mossed and lichened podocarps — fed and hopped so lovingly together that if a Māori noosed one bird, its mate would come to hand.

Working together, joint custodians, His straight crow-bar beak and Her thin curving probe, utterly unlike, conjoined to wingle out tree-eating grubs.

Never widespread or numerous, their superb sober plumes made mourning-wear for centuries until Cook visited. The stuffed ones soon were 'musts' for lounge-rooms, though few knew how well their natures fitted these strange bills.

Charmed by his captive pair, Buller records how native know-how and the foreign gun took in 600 skins from a week's work — most of the world's remaining stock: 'Now safely on the increase'. A common bird today in Auckland's antique shops, its loving notes that ranged from purest whistles to what seemed a puppy's whining call, are gone, lost, all before the age of tapes and films. The bird remains supreme in words of those who loved and stuffed it.

And our museum has one — that is, of course, a pair.

— by Mark O'Connor.

Contributing

Fork it ( https://github.com/Huia/Huia/fork )
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create a new Pull Request

v0dro / Huia