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Overview
========

szl is a tiny, embeddable scripting engine inspired by Tcl and shell. It's a
balanced mix of their key features: szl combines the simplicity of shell
scripting with the power of a dynamic, Tcl-like type system, minimalistic
syntax and programming language features missing in the shell, like exceptions.

szl comes with a rich standard library that includes bindings for
permissively-licensed libraries. Therefore, it can run processes, parse text
with transparent Unicode support, manipulate data structures like dictionaries,
operate on binary data, interface with C code through scripts, multiplex
non-blocking I/O at scale, call REST APIs and much more, at a fraction of the
memory and size footprint of other scripting languages, while achieving
reasonable efficiency.

szl can be used both as a standalone (either interactive or non-interactive)
interpreter or as part of other projects, via the libszl library.
   ___________________________________
  /                                   \
  | >>> $global msg {Hello, world!}   |
  | Hello, world!                     |
  | >>> $load zlib                    |
  | >>> $zlib.crc32 $msg              |
  | 3957769958                        |
  | >>> [$exec {uname -s}] read       |
  | Linux                             |
  | >>> [$open /bin/gunzip rb] read 9 |
  | #!/bin/sh                         |
  | >>> $map i [$range 1 4] {$+ $i 3} |
  | 4 5 6                             |
  \___________________________________/

For more information, see the user manual at http://dimakrasner.com/szl.

Building
========

On Debian (http://www.debian.org) based distributions:

  $ apt-get install git gcc make pkg-config zlib1g-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev
                    libarchive-dev libssl-dev libffi-dev valgrind

Then:

  $ git clone --recursive https://github.com/dimkr/szl
  $ cd szl
  $ make
  $ make install

Under some CPU architectures (most notably, x86_64 and ARMv7), -fPIC is required
to produce shared libraries:

  $ make clean
  $ CFLAGS="-fPIC" make

By default, szl is built with core functionality built-in to the interpreter,
while a big part of the standard library resides in dynamically-loaded shared
objects. This way, the memory consumption of szl scripts that don't use the
entire standard library is lower.

However, in some use cases (for example, when szl is embedded into another
project), this is undesirable.

To build szl as a single executable file, with all extensions linked statically
into the interpreter:

  $ STATIC_ALL=1 make

In addition, built-in extensions can be chosen individually, e.g.:

  $ STATIC_CURL=1 STATIC_FFI=1 make

To embed szl into other projects, use the API defined in szl.h and link with
libszl.

Running
=======

To run an interactive interpreter:

  $ szlsh

Or, to run a script:

  $ szlsh $path

Or, to run a one-liner:

  $ szlsh -c $snippet

Documentation
=============

To build the user manual:

  $ cd doc; make szl.html

To build the API documentation:

  $ cd doc; make api_docs

Credits and Legal Information
=============================

szl is free and unencumbered software released under the terms of the MIT
license; see COPYING for the license text. For a list of its authors and
contributors, see AUTHORS.

The ASCII art logo at the top was made using FIGlet (http://www.figlet.org/).