Jzignet

Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

Janet is a functional and imperative programming language and bytecode interpreter. It is a lisp-like language, but lists are replaced by other data structures (arrays, tables (hash table), struct (immutable hash table), tuples). The language also supports bridging to native code written in C, meta-programming with macros, and bytecode assembly.

Jzignet - Zig library to connect Janet and Zig together.

You can:

• Embed Janet programs into Zig
• Write Janet modules in Zig
• Write bindings in Zig for a C library to be used as a Janet module

Why use these bindings, besides obvious reasons such as connecting together two wonderful languages:

• You don't need to care about conversion between Zig and C. But you have full access to C internals if you need to.
• Plenty of tests which are great examples and guarantee minimal regressions when updating.
• Idiomatic Zig code - everything is typed, names are properly cased, operations on types use methods instead of prefixed global functions.

Currently supported versions:

• Zig 0.13.0
• Janet 1.37.1

Repository is available at sourcehut and at GitHub.

How to use

If you want to just start using it, jump to the examples. Copy them or look at the source code, it is heavily commented.

• Embed Janet into Zig -- run this example with zig build run-embed_janet.
  For a more in-depth overview of this use case you can take a look at @iacore's blog post as well as the example repository.

WARNING: examples are currently not working:

• Write Janet module in Zig -- the template is broken and needs some investigation on how to fix it.

Write bindings in Zig for a C library to be used as a Janet module - this is very close to "Write Janet module in Zig" example, you just need to know how to wrap a C library in Zig, this repository is a perfect example for this.

How to include as a dependency (with zon)

1. Create a file named build.zig.zon with the following content. Put the correct version for tar archive, and change the .hash value when you get and error.

.{
    .name = "janet-zig-test",
    .version = "0.0.1",
    .dependencies = .{
        .jzignet = .{
            .url = "https://git.sr.ht/~greenfork/jzignet/archive/0.7.2.tar.gz",
            .hash = "122087fa45b016bd8ce5fbadd17ef2bd84cd1389119edd3c345486870032ea2b7217",
        },
    },
}

1. Add this to build.zig.

    const jzignet = b.dependency("jzignet", .{ .target=target, .optimize=optimize });

    // your executable defined here
    // const exe = ...;

    exe.addModule("jzignet", jzignet.module("jzignet"));
    exe.linkLibrary(jzignet.artifact("jzignet"));

1. Use in your Zig code

const jzignet = @import("jzignet");

How to include as a dependency (with git submodule)

Currently you can include jzignet as a git submodule. Janet is bundled as a single C source amalgamation file and is compiled directly into this library.

1. Include git submodule into your library, assuming further that libpath is the directory where this library is installed

git submodule add https://github.com/greenfork/jzignet libpath

1. Include the library in build.zig

    const jzignet = b.anonymousDependency("lib/jzignet", @import("lib/jzignet/build.zig"), .{});

    // your executable defined here
    // const exe = ...;

    exe.addModule("jzignet", jzignet.module("jzignet"));
    exe.linkLibrary(jzignet.artifact("jzignet"));

1. Use in your Zig code

const jzignet = @import("jzignet");

Differences with C API

Naming

• janet_ prefix is mostly not present.
• Every type is a Zig struct and corresponding functions are called as methods, for example, janet_table_get(table, key) becomes table.get(key).
• All bindings have idiomatic Zig naming even when Janet uses different ones, for example arity and fixarity are arity and fixArity in Zig.
• Functions like janet_table are available as Table.init, please consult the source code for that.

Semantics

• Function return types return error sets as well as optional values where it makes sense to do so, for example, table.get returns ?Janet and pcall returns Signal.Error!void.

• All types are wrapped into structs. Most of the types support this natively since they are structs in C too, others (Tuple, Struct, String, Keyword, Symbol) cannot be represented as structs directly and they are wrappers with a ptr or slice field containing the original value.

• All functions that have a type at the end, for example, janet_get_number, instead use this signature: get(comptime T: type, ...). Currently these functions exist: get, opt, wrap, Janet.unwrap.

• When you need to supply a pointer to the array and a length in the C version, in Zig version you need to supply just a slice since it has both the pointer and the length, so it's one parameter instead of two. For example,

  int janet_dobytes(JanetTable *env, const uint8_t *bytes, int32_t len, const char *sourcePath, Janet *out);
  

  becomes

  pub fn doBytes(env: *Environment, bytes: []const u8, source_path: [:0]const u8) !Janet
  

• Abstracts are fully typed, no *void pointers to @ptrCast. Take a look at tests for examples with abstracts, they are generally reworked to make them easier to use.

• All functions returning Signal instead return void on OK and return error otherwise with the specified signal, signature is Signal.Error!void.

• doString and doBytes are aliases and return !Janet directly instead of accepting a reference for the return value.

• string, keyword, symbol, nil top-level functions are the only ones to create these types and they do what you want.

• Environment type introduced which is internally a Table but allows conceptually different operations such as defining values and executing code.

Completeness

Bindings are not complete 100% but all the generally useful things are there. If you need any specific part of the API, feel free to contribute or just ask (and you shall receive).

Q'n'A

Q: What's with the name?

A: "janet".replace("a", "zig")

Q: I hate that name.

A: Yes, I know.

License

MIT, see LICENSE file.