The Loom Programming Language!

Welcome to Loom, a modern, concurrent, and shell-aware programming language designed for building powerful developer tools, command-line utilities, and rapid prototyping. Loom blends the expressiveness of Python, the concurrency of Go, and the shell scripting capabilities of Bash into a single, cohesive language.

Key Features

• Task-Based Concurrency: Native support for lightweight tasks and structured concurrency.
• Shell Integration: First-class citizen. Execute shell commands, pipe output, and handle exit codes seamlessly with interpolation.
• Frame-Based Objects: A flexible object system using "Frames" (structs) and "Act" blocks (methods).
• Safe Execution: Strong type checking (compiled via weave) and robust error handling (Result<T>, Option<T>).
• Interpret or Compile: Use loom run for rapid iteration or loom weave to compile to a standalone binary for performance and distribution.

Getting Started

Installation

If you wish to quickly install via cURL, you can do so:

curl -s https://virex.lol/loom/install.sh | bash

Loom is built in Rust. To install, make sure you have Rust and Cargo installed, then clone this repository and build:

git clone https://github.com/virex/loom-programming-language.git
cd loom-programming-language
./build_and_install.sh

The binary will be located at target/release/loom-lang, and $HOME/.local/bin if using the installer.

Usage

Running a script:

Not in path:

cargo run -- program.lm

Installed:

loom program.lm

Compiling to a binary:

Not in path:

cargo run -- weave program.lm -o binary
./binary

Installed:

loom weave program.lm -o binary
./binary

Quick Example

// A simple Loom shell focused program

act main() {
    print("testing basic shell...")
    let res = $ "echo hello world"
    print("stdout: " + res.stdout)
    print("status: " + res.status)

    print("testing interpolation...")
    let name = "loom"
    let cmd = "echo hello {name}"
    let res2 = $ cmd
    print("stdout: " + res2.stdout)

    print("testing stderr and error status...")
    let res3 = $ "ls non_existent_file_12345"
    print("status: " + res3.status)
    print("stderr: " + res3.stderr)

    print("testing complex expression...")
    let res4 = $ ("echo " + "joined " + "string")
    print("stdout: " + res4.stdout)
}

main()

Documentation

• Tutorial: Build a System Monitor: A step-by-step guide to building a real CLI tool.
• Language Guide: Syntax, Types, Control Flow, Frames, and Functions.
• Shell Scripting: Using the $ operator, interpolation, and ShellOutput.
• Concurrency: Tasks, spawn, and await.

Benchmarks

Loom is designed for speed where it matters most—in shell operations and string handling. The weave compiler provides a significant performance boost for computational tasks.

Test	Interpreted	Weaved (Native)	Improvement	Notes
Fibonacci (35)	~61,051ms	~1,209ms	~50.5x 🚀	Deep recursion overhead reduction
String Stress	~627ms	~305ms	~2.0x	100,000 sequential concatenations
Shell Stress	~3,449ms	~3,392ms	Negligible	Bottlenecked by OS process spawning
Sieve (1M)	~5,807ms	~840ms	~6.9x	Array access and memory optimization

Benchmarks conducted on a modern Linux environment. Weaved results are compiled to a standalone Rust binary.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.