KC3 v0.1.16-git

KC3 is a programming language with meta-programmation and a graph database embedded into the language. It aims to be the language for semantic programming, and programming the semantic web.

You can easily convert each KC3 function to a C function. KC3 is both a language and a runtime.

This is a development branch, for the latest release see KC3 v0.1.15.

KC3 is currently a programming language project, inspired by C, Elixir and Common Lisp. It could be described as C with Elixir modules, pattern matching, and a semantic object system. The idea is to plug modules, closures, pattern matching, a graph database and metaprogramming into C99 with an extremely small set of dependencies.

Components :

• The pure C11 libkc3 library is a full KC3 parser and interpreter.
• ikc3 is the interactive interpreter (verbose).
• kc3s is the script interpreter (same as ikc3 but terse).
• There are several C libraries which are installed in lib/kc3/0.1 using the make lib_links command.
• There is a web server in httpd : kc3_httpd.

All binaries can be compiled for four targets :

• main : speed optimizations from GCC/Clang -O2 and debug code like assert is disabled.
• debug : no optimization and debug code like assert is enabled
• cov : code coverage instrumentation
• asan : memory safety instrumentation with ASan, an absolutely awesome tool to detect all memory leaks, double free, segmentation faults, invalid read, invalid write, general memory corruption errors, etc., just run the asan target for a full report at process exit, the report being empty if all is ok.

Supported operating systems (additional dependencies) :

• BSD
• Linux (libbsd, libmd)
• MacOS X (libmd)
• Windows (MSys2) (no network)

Supported architectures :

• aarch64 (arm64, Apple M1, Apple M2)
• amd64
• i386
• sparc64

To install and test KC3 for yourself, you can follow the KC3 Installation Guide.

Users

There are now four full applications written in KC3 that we know of :

• The KC3 Cairo demo which you can run with make demo
• The KC3 SDL2 OpenGL demo which you can run with make demo_gl
• The KC3 website which you can launch locally with make test_httpd with all the KC3 releases and documentation.
• The www.kmx.io website which is closed source and is hosted on kmx.io servers in France using OpenBSD everywhere. We donate to OpenBSD every month because a healthy software ecosystem is a funded ecosystem.

New in this release

• libkc3

  • dlopen inside lib/ only
  • Typed pointer example : (Facts*) → p_facts
  • securelevel between 0 and 3
    • API that can only increase securelevel between 0 and 2
    • 0 = (cfn + system + dlopen + dlsym) + (eval + def*)
    • 1 = def* + eval
      • block all Cfn definition if securelevel(0) > 0
        • env_eval_callable
        • cfn_eval
        • cfn_link
        • cfn_prep_cif
        • buf_parse_pcallable
        • buf_parse_cfn
      • block system() calls if securelevel(0) > 0
        • kc3_system
        • kc3_system_pipe_exec
      • block dlopen() calls if securelevel(0) > 0
        • kc3_dlopen
        • env_dlopen
      • block dlsym() calls if securelevel(0) > 0
        • only ever called by cfn_apply which is already blocked at securelevel > 0
    • 2 = eval
      • block buf_parse_fn if securelevel(0) > 1
      • block buf_parse_pcallable if securelevel(0) > 1
      • block env_eval_callable if securelevel(0) > 1
      • block all env_def* if securelevel(0) > 1
      • block all kc3_def* if securelevel(0) > 1
      • block all facts_add* on global env facts if securelevel(0) > 1
      • block all facts_remove* on global env facts if securelevel(0) > 1
    • 3 = ø (no KC3 eval, C-mode only)
      • [ ] block all enveval* if securelevel(0) > 2

• ikc3

  • Remote procedure call
    • client : ikc3 –client HOST PORT
      • opens a prompt on stdin and forwards parsed tags to server using RPC.request("input")
      • reads structured response from server :

        %RPC.Response{out: "plop\n",
                      err: "warning: message\n",
                      result: (Sw) 5}

    • server : ikc3 –server HOST PORT
      • accepts only one connection and exits
      • works with netcat (no prompt)

• build system

  • use shipped runj as a git submodule to parallelize configure and update_sources
  • use shipped sort as a git submodule to have a portable sort algorithm that gives consistent results across Linux and BSD.

• test infrastructure

  • modular test infrastructure with test/test.subr and test/test_runner
  • use shipped runj to call test_runner in parallel
  • removed ugly sleep 2 that slowed each ikc3 test
  • all tests suites run in under 30 seconds now compared to more than 5 minutes before

Discord invite

Join us on kmx.io Discord server !

Guides

Follow the KC3 guides to discover how to use KC3 for your own projects.

TODO

• libkc3
  • env_init: find lib dir for /usr/local/lib/kc3/0.1/
• HTTPd
  • OAuth2 / jwt
  • dynamic router
    • def_route(:get, “/user/:id/articles/*slug/edit”, UserArticlesController.edit)
• tls
• fx
  • chaining of audio and video previews (folder as a playlist)
  • tags
    • create
      • POST “/tag/:tag/*path”
    • delete
      • DELETE “/tag/:tag/*path”
    • recursive
  • properties
    • recursive
• libkc3
  • hash-table as a KC3 value (map ?)
  • special operators hash table
  • pass by reference and reference counting in all data structures
    • array
    • cow
    • frame
    • list
    • map
  • base-specific big floats
  • macro cast : (Macro) fn (x) { x }
  • pretty printer
    • 80 columns (\n)
  • tags
    • generic walker
    • height function (TAG_VOID: 1, TAG_TUPLE: (1+ (max (height tuple->tags))))
    • has_ident
    • collect_idents
  • facts
    • negative facts : 4 + 2n = not 3 + 2n
    • with ignore variables
  • math
    • arbitrary precision floating point numbers (decimals)
  • enums
  • unions
  • errors (setjmp, longjmp)
    • ffi ?
      • libdwarf
  • control structures
    • when
    • unless
    • switch/case/cond
  • livebook
    • gaussian
  • buf_sha256
  • buf_popen
  • tests