The Thrax Programming Language

Thrax is a little toy programming language I threw together in my free time near the end of 2022. My primary motivation was to learn more of the fine-point details of how dynamically-typed interpreted languages worked (JavaScript, Python and Ruby). In the future, I intend of doing a full write-up of the process and what it taught me on the way.

I was also working on a project at work that involved low-level parsing and interpretation of JavaScript code. While we were using SWC for the actual parsing, writing my own parser gave me a much better understanding of how everything fit together.

You don't have to download or install anything to start using Thrax. Play around with the language and experiment with a few demo scripts at the interactive sandbox.

While it should be trivial to add Thrax to your Rust project, I do not recommend doing so for anything important. At the moment, I do not have the time to maintain or otherwise continue working on Thrax.

Want to explore Thrax on your own machine?

As long as you have Node.js, Rust, and Yarn, you can run and build everything using:

./build.sh --release # or --debug

Or, to run all unit tests:

./test.sh

In Ancient Greece, "Thrax" usually meant "from Thrace." In this case, however, the name is a reference to one of the earliest grammarians, Dionysis Thrax. Just like how Dionysis Thrax had no formal education on grammar, and thus had to discover everything himself, I found myself discovering different aspects of recursive descent parsers and dynamic interpreters on my own. Thus the name, "Thrax".