Lightweight programming language

Lightweight programming languages are designed to have small memory footprint, are easy to implement (important when porting a language to different computer systems), and/or have minimalist syntax and features.[1]

These programming languages have simple syntax and semantics, so one can learn them quickly and easily. Some lightweight languages (for example Lisp, Forth, and Tcl) are so simple to implement that they have many implementations (dialects).[2]

Compiled languages

edit

BASIC

edit

BASIC implementations like Tiny BASIC were designed to be lightweight so that they could run on the microcomputers of the 1980s, because of memory constraints.

Forth

edit

Forth is a stack-based concatenative imperative programming language using reverse polish notation.

Toy languages

edit

FALSE

edit

FALSE is a minimalist esoteric programming language, with a complete implementation done in 1024 bytes.

Brainfuck

edit

Brainfuck is an extremely minimalist esoteric programming language.

FlipJump

edit

FlipJump is a minimalistic One-instruction set computer.[3]

Scripting languages

edit

Io is a prototype-based object-oriented scripting language.

Lisp

edit

Lisp-like languages are very simple to implement, so there are many lightweight implementations of it.

There are some notable implementations:

Derivatives of Lisp:

Tcl-like languages can be easily implemented because of its simple syntax. Tcl itself maybe not so lightweight, but there exists some, if not many, lightweight implementations of languages which have Tcl-like syntax.[4][5][6]

Ring

edit

Ring is a lightweight multi-paradigm scripting language. [7]

Embedded languages

edit

ECMAScript

edit

There are many embeddable implementation of ECMAScript like:

Derivatives of ECMAScript:

Lua is a small (C source is approx. 300 kB tarball, as of version 5.3.5), portable and embeddable scripting language (with LuaJIT as a JIT compiler improving speed). It can be embedded in applications such as computer games to provide runtime scripting capabilities.[8]

Wren

edit

Wren is a small, fast, object-oriented scripting language.[9]

References

edit
  1. ^ Minimalist Language on WikiWikiWeb
  2. ^ "Comparison - if Lisp is the perfect language, why are there so many?".
  3. ^ https://esolangs.org/wiki/FlipJump
  4. ^ "Picol, a TCL interpreter in 550 lines of C code".
  5. ^ "Partcl - a tiny command language".
  6. ^ "Little Interpreted Language".
  7. ^ Beginning Ring Programming - From Novice to Professional | Mansour Ayouni | Apress.
  8. ^ About Lua
  9. ^ "Home". wren.io.

See also

edit