The Luce Guide

Luce is a compiled language for applications. If you know Python, most of it will look familiar: blocks are indented, loops read for name in names, and lists, maps and strings work much as they do there. The main differences are that types are checked before the program runs, that a function which can fail says so in its signature, and that programs compile to native executables. Memory is managed for you, as in Python.

Install#

On macOS or Linux:

curl -fsSL https://luce.luciaos.com/install.sh | sh && . "$HOME/.local/luce/env"

On Windows, in Command Prompt:

curl -fsSLo "%TEMP%\luce-install.cmd" https://luce.luciaos.com/install.cmd && "%TEMP%\luce-install.cmd"

or in PowerShell:

irm https://luce.luciaos.com/install.ps1 | iex

This installs the compiler, luce, and the project tool, luc. On Windows that is all you need: the compiler assembles and links programs itself, so there is no Visual Studio, MinGW or other C toolchain to install. On macOS and Linux it uses the system's C toolchain for that step. Chapter 1 of the Tour covers what you need and a first program.

The documentation#

The documentation comes in three parts.

The Tour is an introduction in ten short chapters, each built around programs you can run. It starts from a first print and ends with running work in parallel. Read it in order.

The Guide covers one topic per chapter in full: types, text, collections, classes and memory, errors, generics, workers, packages, testing and the tools. Gotchas lists the things most likely to surprise you, each linked to where it is explained.

The Reference is the language specification: every rule, with the reasoning behind it. The Tour and the Guide link to it where the exact wording matters.

The programs in this documentation are run as part of the compiler's tests, so their output is what the current compiler prints.