Okay, it’s a little crazy that this silly little language has been under development for ten years!

There isn’t much to say, really, except it’s been a fun and educational (and sometimes frustrating) ten years of tinkering on this bratty language.

Recent Updates

Now for some recent news.

Brat works on OSX again.

The bootstrapping binary (“minibrat”) only worked on Linux. Now there is one for OSX, too (“minibrat-osx”). OSX has also been added to the TravisCI build to help ensure future compatibility.

Parsing is faster.

I spent a significant amount of time focused on making the parser go faster. It is still slow relative to industrial parsers, but much faster than it was!

There isn’t a lot of Brat code to test the parser on, but I’m seeing a 40-60% reduction in parse times.

Faster method name conversion.

Brat escapes quite a few symbols so they are usuable in variable/function names. When calling a method like has_method?, the string passed in must be escaped first.

This can be a bit slow, since it uses regular expressions which requires calling out to the Oniguruma regular expression library.

Now Brat caches these conversions and first attempts a native Lua pattern match before falling back to Oniguruma.

(Some future work involves automatically using native Lua patterns for Brat regular expressions, where possible.)

Symbols are back.

Symbols (:example) are immutable strings again. Fun!

What’s Next?

Who knows? That is what is great about hobbies. You can pick them up and put them down as you like!