Flathead is a tiny, portable JavaScript (ECMA-262) interpreter written in C.

The interpreter does a direct evaluation of the parse tree—it does not currently build any further IR or perform any optimizations. As a result, it starts up very quickly, and performs well on code that wouldn't benefit much from optimization, and less well on code that would (e.g. loops).

Flathead builds on Linux, OSX and *BSD, on x86, x86_64 and ARM architectures.

Flathead comes with the full EcmaScript runtime (i.e. the Date, Math, Array and other global objects) as well as a console object.

Most of the language is now implemented, you can see the remaining work to be done on the Docket.

Download or clone the source and run make within.

git clone https://github.com/ndreynolds/flathead.git
cd flathead
make

This creates an executable at bin/flat within the source directory. (You can optionally run make install to copy this to /usr/local/bin/.)

If you received any errors, you may just be missing dependencies.

flex and bison are required to generate the lexer and parser.

The default build depends on GNU Readline (lreadline) for the REPL, and PCRE (lpcre) for the regular expression implementation. They're not required, however, for a minimal build. Run make readline=off regexp=off to compile without them.

If you're still having trouble building, please create an issue.

Once built, you can run bin/flat without arguments to start a REPL:

$ bin/flat
> 2 + 2
4
>

Or with a script as argument:

$ bin/flat say_hello.js
Hello!

View the parse tree with -n:

$ bin/flat -n
> 2 + 2
source list
  expression statement
    expression (binary)
      +
      number (2.000000)
      number (2.000000)
4
>

See all the options with -h:

$ bin/flat -h
Usage: flat [options] [script.js]

Options:
  -v, --version       print version info
  -h, --help          print this help text
  -i, --interactive   force REPL
  -n, --nodes         print the AST
  -t, --tokens        print tokens

Flathead's test suite can be run against the bin/flat executable, as well as other EcmaScript implementations (assuming you have them installed).

The test runner itself requires Node.js. It locates files with names beginning in test_ and executes them with the configured implementation and options. There are a few Node module dependencies, so you'll need to run npm install before you can run the tests.

The Makefile has a few shortcuts:

make test to run with Flathead's bin/flat executable. make test-v8 to run using v8. make test-node to run using node. make test-sm to run using js (SpiderMonkey). make test-rhino to run using rhino.

There's also:

make test-grammar to verify parsing and AST formation

• With statement (with)
• Labels (e.g. loop1: ...; continue loop1;)
• Automatic Semicolon Insertion
• Unicode
• The JSON object (JSON-js can be used as polyfill)
• URI functions
• String#replace: replacement function
• String#split: RegExp separators