The Roxy scripting language

This is Roxy, an embeddable scripting language targeted towards game development.

The main objectives are:

• A statically typed language that runs on a bytecode VM (with optional AOT compilation via C code generation)
• A GC-less language which uses constraint references and generational references for memory management
• A language that can be easily embedded in C++ codebases with minimal overhead

Currently this project is work in progress. But there's quite a lot implemented already, look at the examples/ for what you can already do!

See the docs/ folder for more detailed design notes about the language.

Building

Requires CMake, Ninja, and a C++20 compiler.

cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON
ninja -C build

On Windows, with clang-cl:

cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang-cl -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang-cl -DCMAKE_MT="C:/Program Files/LLVM/bin/llvm-mt.exe"
ninja -C build

This builds three executables: roxy (the CLI), roxy_tests, and roxy_lsp_server. The default build is -O0; for anything performance-related configure a separate -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo build directory.

Running

./build/roxy examples/hello.roxy

A program's entry point is fun main(): i32. Modules imported by the source file are auto-discovered from its directory. Useful flags:

Flag	Effect
--dump-ir	Print the SSA IR to stderr after compilation
--dump-bc	Print the bytecode disassembly to stderr
--time	Per-phase compile timing, and the compile-vs-execute split
--repeat=N	Compile N times and report averaged timings

Run the test suite with ./build/roxy_tests (see CLAUDE.md for suite filters — the C-backend cases shell out to a system C++ compiler, the rest don't).

Examples

File	Shows
examples/hello.roxy	The smallest complete program
examples/fibonacci.roxy	Recursion
examples/quicksort.roxy	inout container params, in-place mutation
examples/showcase_short.roxy	Structs, constructors, methods, traits, operator overloading
examples/showcase.roxy	The above plus enums, when, generics, trait bounds, uniq ownership
examples/sudoku.roxy	uniq/weak ownership at scale: an owner holding List<uniq Cell>, groups holding List<weak Cell>, cells holding weak back-references, solved by backtracking
examples/lox/	A complete Lox interpreter (~3.3k lines) — the largest program written in Roxy

Known bugs and incomplete work are tracked in TODO.md; the roadmap is in docs/overview.md.