Ray

Ray is a statically typed, interpreted language that aims for the sweet spot between safety and efficiency.
It focuses on clarity, robustness, and runtime performance, while keeping syntax expressive and lightweight.

Ray is implemented in Zig and runs on its own stack-based virtual machine with a mark-and-sweep garbage collector.

Why Ray

Ray brings together ideas from the languages I admire most.
It’s heavily inspired by Rust and Zig syntaxes, yet remains interpreted, making it easy to use, easy to embed, and simple to learn.

While its primary goal is to serve as an embeddable scripting language, Ray is general-purpose and flexible enough for standalone programs — especially thanks to its native C and Zig interop.

Key features

• Statically typed — combines strong typing with type inference for fast iteration
• Expression oriented — every block and control flow construct can return a value
• Error unions — built-in error handling via T!ErrorType
• Nullable types with ? — explicit handling of optional values and fallback values
• Traits and structures — composition-based design with methods and generic behaviors
• Pattern matching — when expressions for type based pattern matching and match for value matching
• Garbage-collected memory — efficient mark-and-sweep collector integrated with the VM
• Macros — metaprogramming on the AST without preprocessors
• Interop with Zig and C — seamless integration for embedding or extending native code
• Simple, consistent syntax — designed to be readable like a scripting language, yet safe like a systems language

Documentation

A work-in-progress specification describes the current syntax, semantics, and design goals of the language.

• Language Specification

Build from source

To build Ray you need Zig compiler version 0.15.2. Clone the repo and run:

git clone https://github.com/martazvch/ray.git
cd ray
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

Tests

I try to cover the maximum errors/use case as possible by testing each individual stage of the pipeline: Ast generation, Analyzer IR output, compiled bytecode and then VM's runtime behavior. You can find them in the tests folder.

To run them, run:

zig build test -Dtest-mode -Dstress-gc