From a4d720d76b4772983a1920758bf71b93903b5243 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Marshall Lochbaum Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2020 22:45:53 -0400 Subject: Update information about the current state of BQN development --- docs/running.html | 16 ++++++++-------- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-) (limited to 'docs/running.html') diff --git a/docs/running.html b/docs/running.html index 6a5a356a..ca02f587 100644 --- a/docs/running.html +++ b/docs/running.html @@ -1,21 +1,21 @@
BQN

How to run BQN

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BQN is in a very early stage of development, and there is currently no complete implementation of the language. However, it's a relatively simple language to implement, and a few implementations come close.

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BQN2NGN

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BQN2NGN is a prototype implementation in Javascript build to experiment with the langauge, which is now abandoned. Because you can use it online, this is probably the quickest way to get started with BQN. It has good primitive support, with the main issues being that it has no Fold and Insert is spelled ´ even though current BQN uses ˝, that it has a different version of Group (⊔), and that it is missing Choose (◶). There are also some spelling differences, with Deduplicate (⍷) spelled with ∪ and Valences (⊘) spelled with ⍠. It is missing value blocks and function headers.

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For automated testing I run BQN2NGN using the bqn executable, which is just a symlink to apl.js in the BQN2NGN repository. It requires Node to run.

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BQN is in an early stage of development, and no implementation is complete yet. However, it's a relatively simple language to implement, and a few implementations come close. At the moment, dzaima/BQN is the most usable version, with good performance and error reporting.

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BQN

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This repository contains a BQN implementation written mainly in BQN: the bytecode compiler is completely self-hosted, and the majority of the runtime is written in BQN except that it is allowed to define primitives; some preprocessing turns the primitives into identifiers. The remaining part, a VM, can be implemented in any language to obtain a version of BQN running in that language. A Javascript implementation allows BQN to be run as a REPL (running locally) from this webpage or in Node.js as a library. The bytecode is also the same as dzaima/BQN's format, and another version of the compiler runs on and targets dzaima+reference BQN. This version also contains an earlier experiment targetting WebAssembly that works only on a very small subset of BQN.

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This version is not yet suitable for serious programming. The runtime checks for errors but the compiler does not, so syntax errors go unreported. It does not yet support function headers or multiple bodies. The Javascript-based compiler is also slow, taking about 0.05 seconds plus 1 second per kilobyte of source (this is purely due to the slow runtime, as dzaima+reference achieves 3ms/kB with the same compiler once warmed up).

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All versions have automated tests in the test directory, with the self-hosted version (test/tj.js) and WebAssembly backend (test/t.js) tested with Javascript using Node and the dzaima/BQN backend tested with BQN itself (test/bt).

dzaima/BQN

dzaima/BQN is an implementation in Java created by modifying the existing dzaima/APL. It should be easy to run on desktop Linux and Android. It is still in development and has almost complete syntax support but incomplete primitive support.

dzaima+reference BQN

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This repository contains a dzaima/BQN script dzref that fills in the gaps in primitive support using BQN implementations of primitives which are not yet up to spec (reference implementations of all primitives starting from a small set of pre-existing functions are part of BQN's specification). These alternate implementations can be slow.

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This repository contains a dzaima/BQN script dzref that fills in the gaps in primitive support using BQN implementations of primitives that are not yet up to spec (reference implementations of all primitives starting from a small set of pre-existing functions are part of BQN's specification).

You can run dzref from ordinary dzaima/BQN using the •EX command; see for example cshim.bqn. For testing, it is run as a Unix script, in which case it depends on an executable dbqn that runs dzaima/BQN on a file argument. I use the following script, using the path to a clone of dzaima/BQN for the jar file.

#! /bin/bash
 
 java -jar /path/to/dzaima/BQN/BQN.jar -f "$@"

The left argument for •EX or the shell arguments can contain up to two arguments for the script. The first is a file to run, and the second is BQN code to be run after it.

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BQN

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This repository contains the beginnings of a self-hosted compiler for BQN, which is not yet complete enough to do any real programming with. There are currently several versions of the compiler: nc.bqn is run with BQN2NGN, while c.bqn is run with dzaima+reference. Both compilers have a simple backend targetting WebAssembly, and c.bqn additionally has a backend that targets dzaima/BQN's own bytecode, so that the compiler uses only BQN, but the runtime uses the Java implementations of BQN primitives from dzaima/BQN. The bytecode compiler has almost complete expression support and also supports blocks, but not headers or multiple bodies.

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All versions have automated tests in the test directory, with the WebAssembly versions tested with Javascript using Node (test/nt.js and test/t.js for BQN2NGN and dzaima/BQN respectively) and the dzaima/BQN backend tested with BQN itself (test/bt).

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BQN2NGN

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BQN2NGN is a prototype implementation in Javascript build to experiment with the langauge, which is now abandoned. It can be used online here. Major differences are that it has no Fold and Insert is spelled ´ even though current BQN uses ˝, that it has a different version of Group (⊔), and that it is missing Choose (◶). There are also some spelling differences, with Deduplicate (⍷) spelled with ∪ and Valences (⊘) spelled with ⍠. It is missing value blocks and function headers.

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