BrighterScript

A superset of Roku's BrightScript language. Compiles to standard BrightScript.

Overview

The BrighterScript language provides new features and syntax enhancements to Roku's BrightScript language. Because the language is a superset of BrightScript, the parser and associated tools (VSCode integration, cli, etc...) work with standard BrightScript (.brs) files. This means you will get benefits (as described in the following section) from using the BrighterScript compiler, whether your project contains BrighterScript (.bs) files or not. The BrighterScript language transpiles to standard BrightScript, so your code is fully compatible with all roku devices.

Help!

[!IMPORTANT] We are currently seeking testers for two major rewrites:

Language Server Protocol (LSP) Rewrite: We’ve been hard at work revamping our LSP to improve stability, performance, and add new features. We would love your feedback as you put it through its paces. (Join the LSP discussion)
Version 1 (v1) Rewrite: This is a complete overhaul of the core of our project. Your input is crucial in helping us identify bugs and further refine the release. (Join the v1 discussion)

If you're interested in helping, please visit the GitHub discussion links above for more information and instructions on how to get involved.

Features

BrighterScript adds several new features to the BrightScript language such as namespaces, classes, import statements, and more. Take a look at the language specification docs for more information.

BrighterScript Language Specification

Why use the BrighterScript compiler/CLI?

Check the entire project for syntax and program errors without needing to run on an actual Roku device.
Catch syntax and program errors at compile time which would not otherwise appear until runtime.
The compiler can be used as part of your tool-chains, such as continuous integration or a custom build pipeline.
Get real-time syntax validation by using the cli in --watch mode.

Why use the BrighterScript language?

Brighterscript is in good hands:
- The project is open source.
- Brighterscript is designed by Roku developers, for Roku developers.
- The project is owned by RokuCommunity and the syntax and features are thoroughly thought out, discussed, and planned.
- Actively developed.
Reduce boilerplate code and time debugging with language features like these:
- Import statements
 - Declare import statements in scripts instead of xml script tags.
 - Automatically add script tags to XML components for all script import statements and their cascading dependencies
 - Missing imports are flagged at compile time.
- Classes
 - Support for class inheritance and method overrides
 - Class fields and can be marked as public, protected, and private and incorrect access will be enforced by compile-time checks.
 - Class methods are automatically scoped to the class
- Namespaces:
 - Automatically add a name prefix to all methods inside a namespace block.
 - Prevents method naming collisions and improves code readability and maintainability.
 - Missing method invocations, and other namespace related syntax errors are reported at compile time.
- Ternary operator
 - username = m.user <> invalid ? m.user.name : "not logged in"
- Template strings
 - print `Hello ${firstNameVar}` .
- null-coalescing operator
 - user = m.user ?? getDefaultUser()
- Additional Language features coming soon
 - null-conditional operator: userSettings = m.user?.account?.profile?.settings
- and more...
Full BrighterScript support for syntax checking, validation, and intellisense is available within the Brightscript Language VSCode extension.
Configure the language server behavior using language server settings.
And if it's not enough, the plugin API allows extending the compiler to provide extra diagnostics or transformations.

Who uses Brighterscript?

The BrighterScript project is used to power the popular Brightscript Language VSCode extension, the maestro framework, and more.

Contact us if you use BrighterScript in your project and would like your logo listed above. More projects are adopting BrighterScript all the time, from using the new BrighterScript language features to simply using the compiler in their build pipeline.

What's with the name?

The name BrighterScript is a compliment to everything that is great about Roku's awesome BrightScript language. Naming things is hard, and discoverability and recognizability are both very important. Here are the reasons we chose this name:

the er in BrighterScript represents the additional features we have added on top of BrightScript
It looks so similar to BrightScript, which is fitting because this language is 95% BrightScript, 5% extra stuff (the er bits).
The config file and extension look very similar between BrightScript and BrighterScript. Take bsconfig.json for example. While brsconfig.json might be more fitting for a pure BrightScript project, bsconfig.json is so very close that you probably wouldn't think twice about it. Same with the fact that .bs (BrighterScript) and .brs are very similar.

We want to honor BrightScript, the language that BrighterScript is based off of, and could think of no better way than to use most of its name in our name.

Installation

npm

npm install brighterscript -g

Usage

Basic Usage

If your project structure exactly matches Roku's, and you run the command from the root of your project, then you can do the following:

bsc

That's it! It will find all files in your BrightScript project, check for syntax and static analysis errors, and if there were no errors, it will produce a zip at ./out/project.zip

Advanced Usage

If you need to confi

Brighterscript

Install / Use

README