Calcium - a Mirah like language for .Net

Hi readers, not sure if anyone is following my GitHub page, but I did fix some of bugs with Calcium language. What is Calcium? Calcium is a Mirah like language (which itself is a Ruby like language) for .Net platform. If you write your code in Ruby using mostly IronRuby conventions (and as much as the minimal features are working), you should get at the end a C# file without any other overhead (excluding the .Net one). For now a simple program is supported, the Mandelbrot fractal generator but the more types/fixes are included. The slowest part of the fractal generator is in fact writing to console.

Want to have quick a C# program that writes to screen and is compiled with Ruby syntax? This mini-compiler could help you.

A code like this one does what you would expeect: writes 10 times "Hello from Calcium" then it counts the time in milliseconds that was required to do so:

def run
   print "Hello from Calcium"
end

start = Environment.TickCount
i = 0
while i < 10
  run
  i += 1
end

endTime = (Environment.TickCount - start) / 1000.0
print "Time: "
puts endTime

The generated C# is the following:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using Cal.Runtime;

public class _Global {

static public void Main ()

{

Int32 start;

Int32 i;

Double endTime;

start = Environment . TickCount;

i = 0;

while(i<10)

{

run();

i += 1;

}

endTime = (Environment . TickCount-start)/1000.0;

Console.Write("Time: ");;

Console.WriteLine(endTime);;

}

static public void run ()

{

Console.Write("Hello from Calcium");;

}

}

As you can see it could be a time saver, and if it will be extended enough, it can replace in future some cases where you used IronRuby and you quit because it felt to slow. I plan to fix and extend this transpiler to make it functional enough to support very common cases.

If you are interested, please take a look and try to extend or report as minimal bug reports as possible.