README.md

muse

A thoughtful, designed-to-be-embedded programming language.

What is Muse?

Muse is a work-in-progress. This section describes what Muse aims to be, but it almost certainly does not fulfill its goals.

Muse is a dynamic language designed to allow Rust developers a lightweight way to run untrusted scripts. It is designed to be familiar to users of other dynamic programming languages, while also feeling inspired by Rust.

Muse aims to be flexible enough to be adopted as a general purpose scripting language, while remaining minimal in its base implementation to ensure embedders have ultimate control over what is available when executing code.

Muse uses Rust's standard library, which means while Muse is designed to be embedded in Rust applications, it is not designed to be used in no_std Rust applications.

For more of what inspires Muse's design, see the design goals chapter of Muse's User's Guide.

Example: Fibonacci

This is a recursive Fibonacci function. This algorithm should never be used in production, as iterative approaches are exponentially faster, but it provides a few opportunities to demonstrate Muse's features.

fn fib(n) {
  if n <= 2 {
    1
  } else {
    fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)
  }
};

fib(10)

At first glance, this may look like a generic dynamically typed language. This is by design: Muse code should be easy to read, regardless of what programming language you're most familiar with. As a language designed for embedding, this is an important design goal.

Muse also supports pattern matching. Here is the same example written using pattern matching instead of if/else:

fn fib(n) {
  match n {
    n if n <= 2 => 1,
    n => fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2),
  }
}

Muse also supports function overloading using the same pattern match syntax. Here's the same function using function overloading:

fn fib {
  n if n <= 2 => 1,
  n => fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2),
}

All of these examples create a function named fib that accepts one parameter and produce identical results.

A full language reference is available in the Muse User's Guide is available in the User's Guide.