wren

a classy little scripting language

Getting Started

Getting Wren up and running on your machine should be pretty straightforward. Tiny C programs with no dependencies are nice that way. If you're on a Unix or Mac and you can rock a command line, it's just:

$ git clone https://github.com/munificent/wren.git
$ cd wren
$ make
$ ./wren

Binaries for other configurations are built to bin/. Static and shared libraries for embedding Wren get built in lib/.

For Mac users, there is also an XCode project under project/xcode. For Windows brethren, project/msvc2013 contains a Visual Studio solution. Note that these may not have the exact same build settings as the makefile. The makefile is the "official" way to compile Wren.

Interactive mode #

The above instructions will drop you into Wren's standalone interpreter in interactive mode. You can type in a line of code, and it will immediately execute it. Here's something to try:

IO.print("Hello, world!")

Or a little more exciting:

for (i in 1..10) IO.print("Counting up ", i)

You can exit the interpreter using good old Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D, or just throw your computer to the ground and storm off.

Running scripts #

The standalone interpreter can also load scripts from files and run them. Just pass the name of the script to wren. Create a file named "my_script.wren" in your favorite text editor and paste this into it:

for (yPixel in 0...24) {
  var y = yPixel / 12 - 1
  for (xPixel in 0...80) {
    var x = xPixel / 30 - 2
    var x0 = x
    var y0 = y
    var iter = 0
    while (iter < 11 && x0 * x0 + y0 * y0 <= 4) {
      var x1 = (x0 * x0) - (y0 * y0) + x
      var y1 = 2 * x0 * y0 + y
      x0 = x1
      y0 = y1
      iter = iter + 1
    }
    IO.write(" .-:;+=xX$& "[iter])
  }

  IO.print("")
}

Now run:

$ ./wren my_script.wren

Neat, right? You're a Wren programmer now! The next step is to read more docs and learn your way around the language. If you run into bugs, or have ideas or questions, any of the following work: