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Io (iolanguage.com)

45 points by philcrissman ↗ HN
Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).

13 comments

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johnrob
The url looks like "LOL language"
dcurtis
That is the most beautiful website ever.
asdflkj
They changed the design sometime in the last 12 hours. The previous one was even better.
dcurtis
I wonder why they did that...
vsingh
Does anyone know how to compile this on Ubuntu?

I Googled and found two guides, but neither of them worked. I'll post the particular compiler error I got when I get home.

thisisnotmyname
I'm having issues installing in cygwin too. Hundreds of errors like: "source/IoBlock.c:58: error: parse error before ')' token"
vsingh
Yes, I get those errors too.

The first error that shows up after executing 'make' is:

    In file included from source/simd_cph/include/simd_cp_x86.h:47,
                     from source/simd_cph/include/simd_cp.h:115,
                     from source/UArray_math.c:13:
    /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.1.2/include/xmmintrin.h:34:3: error: #error "SSE instruction set not enabled"
I'll ask in #io - perhaps they'll know what to do.
vsingh
Alright, I asked for help in #io, and it looks like there was some known problem with SIMD due to a recent patch.

In order to fix it for now, go to libs/basekit/source/UArray_math.c, and comment out the line:

    #define IO_USE_SIMD 1
That should do the trick.
richcollins
I suggest that you use the MSVS compiler, but the cygwin build environment (make sure to set the LIB and INCLUDE env variables). Then:

SYS=Windows make

That is the easiest way in Windows (for now).

tyler
I've been doing a couple side projects in Io over the last few months. It really is a beautiful language. Honestly, it reminds me of what would be the love child of Lisp and Ecmascript.

What really struck me was when I realized that I could get it to do Ruby style hash and array literals, from completely within the language. Really cool stuff.

Also, doing a Markaby clone was remarkably (hah) easy.

Oh, and the Regex library is rather nice.