Llambda is a natively compiled Scheme with optional strong typing. The core language is based on R7RS with a number of extensions influenced by Typed Racket and the SRFI community.
Llambda implements many of the features expected from a modern programming language including:
- First class functions
- Unicode support including UTF-8 strings
- Support for functional programming including higher-order functions such as
map,reduceandfold - Safe programming environment with garbage collected memory, enforced bounds checking and checked integer overflow
- Concurrency support via an implementation of the Actor model
- Pattern matching
- Read-evaluate-print loop
Llambda is implemented with a Scala frontend, LLVM backend and a Scheme and C++11 runtime.
The language is currently very experimental with all non-R7RS language features in flux. Although it's well tested through an extensive functional test suite very few non-trivial programs have been written in Llambda. The lack of bindings for any non-system libraries make it only suitable for standalone programs operating on standard I/O and files.
- Modern Unix-like operating system such as Mac OS X, Linux or FreeBSD. Llambda is explicitly tested on Mac OS X 10.10, Ubuntu 15.04 and FreeBSD 10.1 after every major change.
- CMake 2.8
- LLVM 4.0
- Clang 4.0
- sbt
Ensure that the above requirements are met and the related programs are in your user's path. Then, the runtime can be built using CMake.
$ cd llambda
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ../runtime && make
Llambda takes Scheme source files as input and produces standalone statically linked executables. A trivial "Hello, World" application would look like:
(import (llambda base))
(import (llambda write))
(write "Hello, world!")
(newline)The llambda shell script be can used used to compile Scheme programs by passing their path on the command line. It supports various options which are described by llambda --help. Of particular interest is the -s option which will immediately run the program instead of producing an exectuable. This can be useful for scripting tasks.
For frequent compilation it is more efficient to use sbt to run the compiler from within the sbt environment. This avoids the overhead of launching a JVM for every invokation of the compiler. For example, to compile a program located at /home/example/test.scm would work as follows:
$ cd llambda/
$ sbt
> project compiler
> run /home/ryan/Code/test/test.scm
Generated documentation is hosted at llambda.readthedocs.org