Bob Nystrom
43af98f1a5
Eliminate the performance penalty of an if-test inside the call instruction loop by using explicit goto to share the common tail-end call-handling code between normal and superclass calls. This improves interpreter throughput across multiple benchmarks, with gains of up to 23% on the 'for' benchmark and 14% on 'fib'.
Wren is a small, fast, class-based concurrent scripting language
Think Smalltalk in a Lua-sized package with a dash of Erlang and wrapped up in a familiar, modern syntax.
IO.print("Hello, world!")
class Wren {
flyTo(city) {
IO.print("Flying to ", city)
}
}
var adjectives = new Fiber {
["small", "clean", "fast"].each {|word| Fiber.yield(word) }
}
while (!adjectives.isDone) IO.print(adjectives.call())
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Wren is small. The codebase is about 5,000 lines. You can skim the whole thing in an afternoon. It's small, but not dense. It is readable and lovingly-commented.
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Wren is fast. A fast single-pass compiler to tight bytecode, and a compact object representation help Wren compete with other dynamic languages.
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Wren is class-based. There are lots of scripting languages out there, but many have unusual or non-existent object models. Wren places classes front and center.
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Wren is concurrent. Lightweight fibers are core to the execution model and let you organize your program into an army of communicating coroutines.
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Wren is a scripting language. Wren is intended for embedding in applications. It has no dependencies, a small standard library, and an easy-to-use C API. It compiles cleanly as C99, C++98 or anything later.
If you like the sound of this, give it a try! Even better, you can contribute to Wren itself.
