The Asteria Programming Language

Asteria (/asˈtɪərɪə/, as-TEAR-ee-uh) is a procedural, dynamically typed programming language that is highly inspired by JavaScript.

The most notable difference between Asteria and other languages is that the so-called 'objects' have value semantics. That is, an object is copied when it is passed to a function by value or is assigned to a variable, just like values of primitive types.

• Quick Guide
• Grammar
• Standard Library
• Highlighting Rules for GNU nano

How to Build

First, you need to install some dependencies and an appropriate compiler, which can be done with

# For Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint:
# There is usually an outdated version of meson in the system APT source. Do
# not use it; instead, install the latest one from pip.
sudo apt-get install ninja-build python3 python3-pip pkgconf g++  \
        libpcre2-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libedit-dev
sudo pip3 install meson

# For MSYS2 on Windows:
# The `iconv_open()` etc. functions are provided by libiconv. Only the MSYS
# shell is supported. Do not try building in the MINGW64 or UCRT64 shell.
pacman -S meson gcc pkgconf pcre2-devel openssl-devel zlib-devel  \
        libiconv-devel libedit-devel

# For macOS:
# The `gcc` command actually denotes Clang, so ask for a specific version
# explicitly.
brew install meson pkgconf gcc@10 pcre2 openssl@3 zlib libedit
export CXX='g++-10'

Then we can build as usual

meson setup build_debug
meson compile -Cbuild_debug

Finally we launch the REPL, as

./build_debug/asteria

If you need only the library and don't want to build the REPL, you may omit libedit from the dependencies above, and pass -Denable-repl=false to meson.

License

BSD 3-Clause License