The creator (smihica, Shin Aoyama) hasn't come to the forum yet, but their work is impressive. Just look at that REPL start up in under a second! On my machine anyway. :)
Thanks to svetlyak40wt for discovering this project 80 days ago (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=18355). It was in active development then, and it's still active now.
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The primary spark that led me to make Rainbow.js was a desire to respond constructively to threads like this one.
Using Rainbow was a side effect because I wanted to wow people with the execution speed, which conanite had already meticulously worked on in Rainbow. This was still tied into the desire to help those forum threads along: Between speed and portability, what possible excuse could there be not to use it? ^_^
Once I committed to particular technical goals involving consistency with Rainbow, the 20,000 lines of code were basically predetermined. It's kind of unfortunate that it would fail to be helpful in threads like this one, but it's not all a loss.
The secondary spark that led me to make Rainbow.js was that I wanted to get the hang of using JavaScript, after having worked mostly in Arc for a few years. That goal was met. :)
Thank you so much for this!! arc-js looks great. I'm able to define and run Arc macros with it.
This changes everything. With arc-js you can start writing client-side apps in the browser without dealing with Javascript. You can add libraries in arc-js that do that (are there any already?) The big advantage is you bypass HTML: you can make a browser and a server send sexps back and forth.
There I was thinking there was no hope with an Arc in Javascript and sure enough Arc is quietly thriving.
That arc-js looks very promising, though also somewhat incompatible with the existing libraries.
For instance, the basic fizzbuzz example provided on the main page looks very similar, but doesn't actually run in anarki. Maybe that's anarki's fault, but the syntax of the for loop is different.
I do like the idea of arc ported to js though; makes getting access to mongodb easier, at the very least :)
In general, worrying about compatibility in the arc/anarki neighborhood is a fool's errand. Not worth doing. Just do what makes sense, and don't be afraid to be different.
Thanks for sharing, rocketnia! I’ve been looking into ways of getting started, and Arc.js looks like the most novice-friendly implementation so far. Node.js and browser is what I use for hobby coding anyway. :)
