Eat Your Greens (EYG)

EYG is a scripting language with structural typing, managed effects and immutable dependencies.

Install the CLI with:

curl -fsSL https://eyg.run/install | bash

A hello world example script.

#!/usr/bin/env eyg
{
  script: (_) -> {
    let _ = perform StandardOut("Hello, World!\n")
    0
  }
}

Update permissions chmod +x entry.eyg. Then run the script directly ./entry.eyg.

Scripts and modules

Any file containing valid source code is a module. The file containing just 5 is a module.

An EYG script is a function from the list of script arguments to a returned exit code. The type of a script function is (List(String)) -> Integer

A valid script module has a script function as a field of a record. The type of a script file/module is {script: (List(String)) -> Int, ..}.

Run a script using eyg script path/to/script.

Entryfiles

An entryfile is the first module run. It can be a valid script file and, because records are extensible, have other fields. For example a module with a "shell" field is a valid shell config.

Top-level modules may be executable and have a shebang (#!/usr/bin/env eyg).

The example below works as a script and shell config.

// entry.eyg
let tests = import "./path/to/tests.eyg"
{
  script: (arguments) -> {
    let counts = test({})
    match !equal(counts.failed, 0) {
      True({}) -> { 0 }
      False({}) -> { 1 }
    }
  },
  shell: (_) -> {
    perform Break({})
  }
}

Start the shell with eyg shell entry.eyg Run all the tests with eyg script entry.eyg

EYG is a strongly typed replacement for bash, make and shell tools in general. Type check your whole project, application and scripts with eyg check entry.eyg

Pure evaluation

Use eyg eval for evaluating pure values, no side effects, and printing the result.

Resources

• For the full CLI reference see packages/gleam_cli/README.md.
• To create, protect, and use publishing identities see guides/managing_signatories.md.
• The language syntax is described in guides/syntax.md.
• Every !builtin is catalogued in guides/builtins_reference.md.
• Full effect reference is in ./guides/cli_effects_reference.md.
• File and import path resolution is explained in guides/file_resolution.md.
• To install from source see ./guides/install_from_source.md.

Packages

The intermediate representation (IR) of EYG is a minimal tree and is the stable interface for writing EYG programs. Type checking, syntax, evaluation or compilation are optional components built on this foundation.

This repository contains the language definition, implementation, website and package hub.

EYG makes it easy to swap out components of the toolchain. A sensible reason could be to create a runtime with a unique set of effects, i.e. embed EYG in a game or website. Another reason could be to imagine your own syntax, or even visual editor, and reuse the EYG interpreter and packages.

• spec A JSON spec of all evaluation rules. Compiler and interpreter implementations should use this as their test suite.
• gleam_analysis Type inference for expressions, effects and scope variables in EYG programs.
• gleam_cli The CLI for running EYG programs and interacting with the EYG hub.
• gleam_hub Schemas, encoders and decoders for the EYG Hub API. (Unpublished)
• gleam_ir Data structures for the EYG IR. This is the original implementation of EYG.
• gleam_interpreter A Gleam interpreter for EYG targeting JavaScript. Runs in the browser and on the server.
• gleam_parser Parser for a curly braces syntax for EYG IR.
• hub Backend application for eyg.run. Stores modules, packages and signatories.
• morph Higher level AST and transformation functions for structural edits. (Unpublished)
• touch_grass Common effect definitions (types, decoders and encoders) for your Eat Your Greens (EYG) runtime.
• untethered Location independent datastructures to immutably record decisions. Foundation of EYG hub package signing. (Unpublished)
• vscode-eyg VS Code extension and canonical TextMate grammar, also used by the web guides.
• website Website for documentation, guides and introduction on eyg.run.

EYG packages

eyg_packages

The source for packages maintained as a standard library i.e. standard and json. Other packages in this collection are for demo purposes i.e. catfact The overlay package contains access policy helpers for CLI effects.

Philosophy

Building better languages and tools; for some measure of better.

"Eat Your Greens" is a reference to the idea that eating vegetables is good for you, however the benefit is only realised at some later time.

Projects in this repo introduce extra contraints, over regular programming languages and tools. By doing so more guarantees about the system built on them can be given.

Previous experiments

Over the last few years the Eat Greens Principle to build actor systems, datalog engines. A record of these experiments is at https://petersaxton.uk/log/. The code for these experiments is no longer available if you want to ask more about them reach out to me directly