Sparkling is a little C-style scripting language I've started as a pet project back in late 2012. It has evolved into a quite serious code base now, so I'm opensourcing it in the hope that 1. it will be useful for the community, and 2. others seeing the potential in it will help me make it better.

On the one hand, the name "Sparkling" comes from my intent to make the language nice, fast and lightweight, properties I associate with sparks in my mind. On the other hand, my nickname (H2CO3) has a lot to do with carbonated water and bubbles.

Sparkling is influenced by other programming languages, namely:

• C, above all. C is a wonderful programming language, it's well-balanced between a high-level and a low-level language. It has enough but not too much abstraction. Its syntax is clear, concise and well-structured. Quite a lot of languages inherit some of C's design patterns, especially syntax.
• Lua. Being small, compact, fast and embeddable was a primary goal while I have been designing Sparkling. In addition, having a separate operator for concatenation is just inevitable. Furthermore, making a strict distinction between arrays and dictionaries is something I always wanted to avoid, and Lua confirmed that it's a viable concept in production.
• Python. Python has dynamic and strong typing. That's good because it's convenient and safe at the same time. Following this pattern, Sparkling has a strict strong type sytem, but variables don't have types, only values do, so any value can be stored in a variable, and runtime checks enforce the correctness of operations.
• Design errors of JavaScript. JavaScript is a horrible language in my opinion. (Sorry, but I feel like that, nobody has to agree.) It has some fundamental flaws that I wanted to eliminate in order to create a sane language. Overloading the '+' operator for concatenation, equality operators that don't work the way one would expect, block statements without scope, implicitly global undeclared variables, semi-reserved (unused and unusable) keywords, object and function names hard-coded into the language -- argh. And at the end, people even call JavaScript a "small and lightweight" language, even though when we look at any decent JavaScript engine (just think of V8, Nitro, SquirrelFish, SpiderMonkey, etc.), all of them consist of dozens or even hundreds of megabytes of sophisticated, overly complex code. There isn't any need for that in an embedded scripting language. The only thing that Sparkling borrows from JavaScript is the keyword for declaring variables: var.
• Other "default" mistakes that almost every scripting language has had so far. For example, the exclusive use of floating-point numbers for arithmetic operations, even for integers. It's a well-known fact that floating-point computations aren't always exact, they behave in a quite counter-intuitive manner and they can even be significantly slower than integer operations. Another thing is garbage collection. It seems to be the silver bullet of automatic memory management when it comes to scripting languages, but it has some definitive, serious downsides. Non-deterministic behavior is one, speed is two, memory overhead is three, the difficulty of a decent implementation is four. Reference counting is a simpler approach that is more lightweight, easier to implement, completely deterministic and it has no memory allocation overhead (a program uses only as much memory as needed). Refcounting has its disadvantages too (e. g. memory leaks caused by cyclic references), but I believe that its good properties outweigh them.

• Small, embeddable: compiled size less than 100kB; tiny grammar, simple rules
• Portable: written in pure ANSI C89 - runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, ... it can also be used from within a C++ program (apart from the requirement that the library itself should be compiled as C and not as C++, the public parts of the API are entirely C++-compatible.)
• Well-designed (at least it is supposed to be well-designed):
  • strict yet dynamic typing and consistent semantics: less programmer errors
  • uses integers to perform integer operations (faster, exact, allows bit ops)
  • easy-to-grasp, readable C-style syntax
  • no global variables
  • no implicit conversions or type coercion
• Fast: speed comparable to that of Lua
• Friendly: automatic memory management
• Extensible: simple and flexible C API
• Free: Sparkling is free software, the reference implementation is licensed under the 2-clause BSD License (see LICENSE.txt for details).

To learn Sparkling, check out the tutorial/reference manual in doc/, then have a look at the examples in the examples/ directory. Don't worry, there will be more and more documentation over time, but for now that's all I've got.

Using the Sparkling engine is fairly easy. As in the case of practically any modern scripting language, running a program involves three simple steps:

1. Parse the source text;
2. Compile it into bytecode;
3. Execute the bytecode.

The Sparkling C API provides functions for these tasks. For usage information, have a look at implementation of the stand-alone interpreter in repl.c.

If you have fixed a bug, improved an algorithm or otherwise contributed to the library and you feel like sharing your work with the community, please send me a pull request on GitHub with a concise description of the changes. I only ask you to please respect and follow my coding style (placement of brackets and asterisks, indentation and alignment, whitespace, comments, etc.)

The Sparkling API also has some very basic debugging facilities: namely, it is possible to dump the abstract syntax tree of a parsed program (in order to examine the behavior of the parser) and one can disassemble compiled bytecode as well (so as to debug the compiler and the virtual machine).

If you have any questions or suggestions, you have used Sparkling in your project or you want to share anything else with me, feel free to drop me an e-mail or a tweet (I run by the name @H2CO3_iOS on Twitter). You may also find me on irc.freenode.net by the same nick, on the channel #sparkling. I appreciate any feedback, including constructive (and polite) criticism, improvement suggestions, questions about usage (if the documentation is unclear), and even donations :P

I've created an entry/wiki page for Sparkling on Rosetta Code, feel free to browse, edit and/or suggest modifications to it. Also check out the list of not implemented tasks and implement some of them at your will (please let me know if/when you implement one, so that I can check it).

If you are using Gedit for coding, check out the sparkling.lang file -- install it in the appropriate location to have Gedit recognize the syntax of Sparkling and apply syntax highlighting on your code.

This is an alpha release, so don't expect the engine to be perfect (actually, not even feature-complete). Although I always try to do my best and test my code as much as possible, there may still be bugs - let me know if you find one and I'll fix it as soon as possible. The syntax and semantics of the language are subject to change, too (at least until it leaves alpha), so in the early days, code that ran yesterday can break today. But this is done only in order to let the community decide what kind of features, syntactic and semantic rules would be the best, and when I will have gathered enough suggestions, I'll freeze the language specification. (This is also good for me since now I can procrastinate writing the full specs until the beta release...)

In the meantime, please experiment with the library, write extensions, try to break the code (I appreciate bug reports), play around with the engine in various situations, on different platforms. The more people use Sparkling, the better it will become. Check out the Makefile (with special regards to the BUILD variable) as well and tailor it to your needs.

Happy programming!

-- H2CO3