Mica

A simple, human-friendly scripting language, developed one feature at a time.

• Human-friendly syntax inspired by Ruby and Lua
• Simple yet extensible by providing a small amount of flexible language features
• Easily embeddable into existing programs
• Still highly work in progress!

You can try out the REPL with cargo run -p mica-cli --release.

A language reference is available here.

Performance

``` func factorial(n) i = 1 x = 1 while i <= n do x = x * i i = i + 1 end x end

iteration = 1 result = 0 while iteration <= 100000 do result = factorial(15) iteration = iteration + 1 end

print(result) ```

Factorial benchmark

```

hyperfine --warmup 5 'target/release/mica code/functions.mi' 'lua5.1 code/functions.lua' 'python3 code/functions.py' Benchmark 1: target/release/mica code/functions.mi Time (mean ± σ): 94.8 ms ± 6.8 ms [User: 93.8 ms, System: 1.2 ms] Range (min … max): 91.5 ms … 121.1 ms 31 runs

Benchmark 2: lua5.1 code/functions.lua Time (mean ± σ): 27.5 ms ± 1.9 ms [User: 26.7 ms, System: 1.2 ms] Range (min … max): 26.9 ms … 45.9 ms 97 runs

Benchmark 3: python3 code/functions.py Time (mean ± σ): 117.5 ms ± 1.3 ms [User: 116.2 ms, System: 1.4 ms] Range (min … max): 115.6 ms … 119.9 ms 25 runs

Summary 'lua5.1 code/functions.lua' ran 3.44 ± 0.34 times faster than 'target/release/mica code/functions.mi' 4.27 ± 0.30 times faster than 'python3 code/functions.py' ``` It's not ideal yet but hopefully it'll get better with time. Current bottlenecks include: - Stack-based rather than register-based virtual machine - Rust not having a way of doing direct threading in the interpreter dispatch loop. Tail calls when - The bytecode compiler not optimizing much