With apologies to Robert Pirsig:
Is it a language, or an operating system, or a virtual machine?
Mu.
Mu's code looks quite alien, requiring editors to be specially configured to
colorize it in a sane manner. So this page provides links to the source files
showing how it currently looks in my custom setup.
Whetting your appetite: some example programs.
- x.mu: a simple program to add two numbers
together. Shows that at bottom mu is a simple VM bytecode designed to convert
directly to machine code.
- factorial.mu: everyone's favorite
example, showing how mu supports conditionals and loops without any special
syntax, using the special labels '{' and '}'.
- tangle.mu: another (contrived) version
of factorial showing mu's ability to 'tangle' code from multiple places into a
single function or 'recipe'.
- counters.mu: lexical scope
- callcc.mu: first-class continuations. Mu
also supports first-class functions and delimited continuations.
- simple examples showing off support for concurrency: fork.mu,
channel.mu
- simple examples showing off hardware control: display.mu,
keyboard.mu.
- screen.mu: example program showing
print primitives that inject a screen dependency which can be faked
for testing.
- chessboard.mu: putting it all
together, the big kahuna: a complete console program along with thorough tests
of its behavior including both screen and keyboard handling.
Part I: basic infrastructure
000organization.cc: the basic
skeleton program. Compiles and runs but doesn't do much. Later layers
hook into this skeleton to add functionality. Mu's guarantee: you can load
features up until any layer, and it will compile and pass all tests until
that point. More details →
001help.cc: just a simple test layer
to show how to hook into the skeleton. Also summarizes how to invoke mu,
behaviors that later layers will be providing.
002test.cc: mu's minimalist test
harness, relying on a couple of one-liners in the makefile to autogenerate
lists of tests to run.
003trace.cc: support for logging
facts about our program, and for checking the facts logged in tests.
(tests for the test harness)
Part II: the mu virtual machine, designed to compile easily to
machine language.
010vm.cc: core data structures: recipes
(fun