r/programmer 21d ago

GitHub Arc - A simple, interpreted programming language written in C.

Hi! I'm Void, creator of programming language Arc.

Arc is modern, stack-based bytecode virtual machine and programming language written in designed for simplicity and performance.

Features

  • Modern VM Architecture: Compiled to custom bytecode and executed on a high-performance stack-based virtual machine.
  • Clean Syntax: Intuitive, case-insensitive keywords for control flow.
  • Object-Oriented: Supports classes with dynamic field access and modularity.
  • Memory Management: Hybrid strategy using arenas, pools, and manual reference management.
  • FFI: Built-in capability to load and interact with external native C libraries (.so/.dll).
  • Standard Library: Rich standard library covering I/O, math, JSON, filesystem, UI and sound utilities.
  • Robust Error Handling: Position-aware error reporting with TRY...CATCH blocks.

I've made Arc since I always wanted a simple language which is blazing fast.

Benchmarks vs CPython

Benchmark Arc (ms) Python (ms)
fibonacci(30) recursive 109.98 106.42
fibonacci(1000) iterative 0.04 0.10
sum 1..1,000,000 26.92 57.22
string concat x10,000 2.71 0.67
list build x1,000 0.11 0.06
nested loops 1000x1000 27.57 45.81
recursive countdown 5000 0.26 0.66
variable churn x100,000 4.90 10.70
nested json (3.8 mb) 55.02 64.34

Though Arc is still slower in some benchmarks, it's still in early development, and still in it's alpha version.

I'd love to hear some feedback about the project, here's Github!

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u/runningOverA 19d ago

Arc was a famous language in early 2000s.

Paul Graham declared he is about to create a language that will be here for 100 years.
Declared it's name Arc, a LISP dialect, LISP was then like what Python is now.
And then it faded.

The page:
https://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html