The Irken Compiler

Irken is a statically-typed, simplified variant of Scheme. Or... a lisp-like variant of ML, depending on your point of view. If you're not familiar with either family of languages, Irken is a strongly typed, compiled language with a lisp-like syntax extensible with macros. It uses type inference along with a powerful type system to give you the speed of a compiled language with high-level data types and unprecedented safety.

• Why: to host massively scalable systems scriptable via a python-like language.
• How: compile a vm using continuation-passing style to avoid using the C stack.
• Blog: http://alien.nightmare.com/
• GitHub: https://github.com/samrushing/irken-compiler/
• Older Source: http://nightmare.com/rushing/irken/

News:

130301: The 'ctailfun/noreg-ssa' branch has been merged into master. This is a fairly radical rearchitecting of the compiler that will enable lots of fun new stuff like an LLVM backend, JIT, separate compilation, etc...

Introduction/Tutorial:

http://dark.nightmare.com/rushing/irken/irken/lang.html

The best way to get familiar with the language is to read the source code in the 'self' directory, and browse over the files in "tests".

Bootstrap:

Irken is now written in itself, so you need to bootstrap it. You can do this via the python script, or manually. [see https://github.com/samrushing/irken-compiler/wiki/bootstrapping-manually]

Just run the script "util/bootstrap.py":

$ python util/bootstrap.py
[the default compiler is 'clang', to use gcc:
  $ CC=gcc python util/bootstrap.py ]

Which does the following:

1. compile the distributed version of self/compile.c
2. this binary will be used to recompile the compiler.
3. that binary will recompile the compiler again.
4. the output from steps 2 and 3 are compared, they should be identical.

Note: It is not possible to compile with optimization off, because this disables the tail call optimization that Irken relies on - otherwise the stack will overflow instantly.

At this time (early 2013), clang builds -O3 in about 30 seconds. gcc 4.8 seems to do a better of job of optimizing than clang 3.2, but takes about twice as long to compile.

Installation:

$ python util/install.py

This will install support files into /usr/local/lib/irken and the binary as /usr/local/bin/irken. If you want to use a different prefix (like /usr), edit util/install.py and self/context.scm, and rebuild self/compile before installing:

$ self/compile self/compile.scm

Usage:

Here's a sample - build the toy VM and test it out:

$ cd vm
$ irken vm.scm
$ ./vm tests/t11.byc

The VM executes some bytecode that runs the 'tak' benchmark 20 times.

You might want to try looking at and understanding the 'verbose' output from the compiler, using a relatively small example:

$ irken -v tests/t_while.scm

Irken will use the CC and CFLAGS environment variables when compiling the C output. You may try out another compiler like this:

$ CC="gcc" CFLAGS="-std=c99 -O2 -I." irken ...