From bbe589b136df82a3e0a6e0801b33218c49105fb6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Marshall Lochbaum Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2021 22:03:37 -0400 Subject: Move executable to bqn.js so the online REPL doesn't have to load lots of node-specific code --- docs/running.html | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'docs/running.html') diff --git a/docs/running.html b/docs/running.html index cd3eac79..f11791be 100644 --- a/docs/running.html +++ b/docs/running.html @@ -7,7 +7,7 @@

How to run BQN

There are currently two active BQN implementations: the self-hosted one in this repository, and the independent dzaima/BQN. Neither is entirely complete but they are quite capable for pure programming tasks (say, implementing a compiler). dzaima/BQN has good performance while self-hosted is about a thousand times slower. I tend to develop parts of applications in the online REPL and move to dzaima/BQN scripts in order to run them.

BQN

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The online REPL is here. The file docs/bqn.js is zero-dependency Javascript, and can be loaded from HTML or Node.js. It can also be called directly from the command line (using Node): pass a file and •args or -e to execute all remaining arguments directly and print the results. This notebook shows how to run it in an Observable notebook.

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The online REPL is here. The file docs/bqn.js is zero-dependency Javascript, and can be loaded from HTML or Node.js. For command line use, call the Node.js script bqn.js, passing a file and •args, or -e to execute all remaining arguments directly and print the results. This notebook shows how to run it in an Observable notebook.

The version of BQN in this repository is implemented mainly in BQN itself—the compiler is entirely self-hosted, while the runtime is built from a small number of starting functions using preprocessed BQN. It completely supports the core language except for block headers and multiple body syntax, and a few cases of structural Under (⌾). 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 1ms/kB with the same compiler once warmed up).

Because self-hosted BQN requires only a simple virtual machine to run, it is fairly easy to embed it in another programming language by implementing this virtual machine. The way data is represented is part of the VM implementation: it can use native arrays or a custom data structure, depending on what the language supports. An initial implementation will be very slow, but can be improved by replacing functions from the BQN-based runtime with native code. As the VM system can be hard to work with if you're not familiar with it, I advise you to contact me to discuss this option it you are interested.

In progress VMs are CBQN in C, and ebqn in Erlang. Although both of these work (can compile and run code; only missing some fill support in CBQN), neither is considered useful for any purpose yet. CBQN is likely to become the main high-performance BQN implementation but is currently only a few times faster than Javascript and has an interface that's only useful for testing. ebqn is extremely slow—hours to compile.

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