squirrel3

The Squirrel programming language, version 3.1.RC. This repository is made available with the author's permission.

Overview

Squirrel is a high level imperative, object-oriented programming language, designed to be a light-weight scripting language that fits in the size, memory bandwidth, and real-time requirements of applications like video games. Although Squirrel offers a wide range of features like:

• open source MIT licence
• dynamic typing
• delegation
• classes & inheritance
• higher order functions
• lexical scoping
• generators
• cooperative threads (coroutines)
• tail recursion
• exception handling
• automatic memory management (CPU bursts free; mixed approach ref counting/GC)
• both compiler and virtual machine fit together in about 7k lines of C++ code and add only around 100kb-150kb the executable size
• optional 16bits characters strings
• powerful embedding api
• eg. function/classes can be defined by scripts or in C
• eg. objects can fully exist in the VM or be bound to native code
• eg. classes created in C can be extended by scripts or vice-versa
• and more

Squirrel is inspired by languages like Python, Javascript, and especially Lua (the API is very similar and the table code is based on the Lua one)