Category:Sparkling: Difference between revisions

$ spn -r hello.spn

* Floating-point, integral and integralcomplex mathematical functions

* QueryingShell and environment access (including system date and time)

Sparkling is an interpreted language, featuring a simple two-pass compiler and a register-based virtual machine. The compiler consists of a purely recursive descent parser and an almost naive (overwhelmingly non-optimizing) code generator, which directly generates bytecode for the VM. The compiler and the parser communicate using a right-leaning, binary abstract syntax tree (AST). The libraryREPL also contains a disassembler which can convert bytecode into an assembly-like, human-readable textual representation.

Despite the fact that the reference implementation imposes an interpreted nature on the language, there are plans aiming to create a just-in-time (JIT) compiler back-end that produces native executable code (rather than bytecode targeting the VM). The implementation of the REPL also features a "compiler" option (-c), which converts Sparkling source files into bytecode files. The format of the bytecode is not portable, so such an "object file" runs only on the platform/architecture it has been compiled on. This is done like so for simplicity and performance reasons: for example, floating-point and integer constants are stored in the bytecode as they are represented in memory, so that there needn't be any - potentially expensive and/or inconvenient to implement - runtime conversions.

Apart from the already mentioned disassembler, the virtual machine provides a basic stack tracing feature, which can be accessed using the C API. Efforts are being made for extending the bytecode format with basic debug