Ark is a systems programming language somewhere inbetween C and C++. It's goals are to modernize the C language, yet remove the cruft that is present in C++ due to backwards compatibility.
On the right is a gif of an example program ark-gl written in Ark using OpenGL and GLFW.
Check out the contributing guide, there's a lot of information there to give you ideas of how you can help out.
Ark is still a work in progress, this code sample reflects what Ark can do currently, though the way you write the following will likely change in the near future.
More examples can be found here.
// binding to printf
[c] func printf(fmt: ^u8, ...);
pub func main(argc: int, argv: ^^u8) -> int {
// accessed via the C module
C::printf(c"Running %s\n", ^argv);
// mutable i, type inferred
mut i := 0;
for i < 5 {
C::printf(c"%d\n", i);
i += 1;
}
return 0;
}
Installing Ark is simple, you'll need a few dependencies before you get started:
- Go installed and
$GOPATH
setup - Instructions on setting up GOPATH - subversion
- LLVM installed, with
llvm-config
in your$PATH
- a C++ compiler
libedit-dev
installedCMake
installed
Replace release
to match your llvm release. You can check by running
the llvm-config --version
command. If you are on 3.6.1, release
would
become RELEASE_361
, or RELEASE_362
for 3.6.2, and so on.
$ release=RELEASE_362 # set this to match your llvm-config --version
$ svn co https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/tags/$release/final $GOPATH/src/llvm.org/llvm
$ cd $GOPATH/src/llvm.org/llvm/bindings/go
$ ./build.sh
$ go install llvm.org/llvm/bindings/go/llvm
$ go get github.com/ark-lang/ark/...
The ark
binary will be built in $GOPATH/bin
. To use the compiler,
make sure $GOPATH/bin
is in your $PATH
.
Currently the module system Ark uses is a work in progress. As of writing this, each ark file represents a module. A module has a child-module "C" which contains all of the C functions and other bindings you may write.
Given the following project structure:
src/
- main.ark
- entity.ark
- player.ark
To compile this, you would pass through the file which contains the main entry point (main function) to your program, which is most likely going to be called "main.ark". However, because our projects source files are in another directory ("src/"), we need to set the "base directory" -- the base directory is where the ark compiler will scan for other modules.
To do this we use the --basedir
flag, which can be shortened to -b
. We can
then pass in the main module after this, and any flags you want to use:
ark build -b src main --loglevel=debug
This should compile your code, and produce an executable called "main", which you can then run.
For more information on the module system and how it works, refer to the "Modules and Dependencies" section in the Ark reference.
For more information on program flags, refer to the "Program Input", section in the Ark reference.