Mica

A simple, human-friendly scripting language, developed one feature at a time.

• Human-friendly syntax inspired by Ruby and Lua
• Simple yet extensible by providing a small amount of flexible language features
• Easily embeddable into existing programs
• Still highly work in progress!

You can try out the REPL with cargo run -p mica-cli --release.

A language reference is available here.

Performance

func factorial(n)
   i = 1
   x = 1
   while i <= n do
      x = x * i
      i = i + 1
   end
   x
end

iteration = 1
result = 0
while iteration <= 100000 do
   result = factorial(15)
   iteration = iteration + 1
end

print(result)

Factorial benchmark

> hyperfine --warmup 5 './target/release/mica code/functions.mi' 'lua5.1 code/functions.lua'
Benchmark 1: ./target/release/mica code/functions.mi
  Time (mean ± σ):     291.8 ms ±   5.9 ms    [User: 288.5 ms, System: 3.1 ms]
  Range (min … max):   287.2 ms … 307.3 ms    10 runs

Benchmark 2: lua5.1 code/functions.lua
  Time (mean ± σ):      28.0 ms ±   0.5 ms    [User: 27.3 ms, System: 1.1 ms]
  Range (min … max):    27.2 ms …  31.1 ms    99 runs

Summary
  'lua5.1 code/functions.lua' ran
   10.41 ± 0.29 times faster than './target/release/mica code/functions.mi'

It's not ideal yet but hopefully it'll get better with time. Current bottlenecks include:

• A really stupid compiler that does zero optimizations
• Stack-based rather than register-based virtual machine
• Rust's safety features working against my goal of being faster than Lua