Irken is a statically-typed, simplified variant of Scheme.  Or, a lisp-like variant of ML.

Why: to host massively scalable systems scriptable via a python-like language.
How: use continuation-passing style to avoid using the C stack.

Blog:         http://alien.nightmare.com/
GitHub:       https://github.com/samrushing/irken-compiler/
Older Source: http://nightmare.com/rushing/irken/

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Irken is now written in itself, so you need to bootstrap it.  You can do this
via the python script, or manually.
[see https://github.com/samrushing/irken-compiler/wiki/bootstrapping-manually]

Just run the script "util/bootstrap.py":

$ python util/bootstrap.py

Which does the following:
1) run gcc on the distributed version of self/compile.c
2) this binary will be used to recompile the compiler.
3) that binary will recompile the compiler again.
4) the output from steps 2 and 3 are compared, they should be identical.

If you're happy with the resulting compiler, you can compile an optimized
version of self/compile.c, but be warned - you'll need a lot of memory and
a lot of time.

I am using dragonegg for optimized builds, and that seems to take about a GB
of memory, and 18 minutes to build.  It's important to use '-O2', not '-O',
because '-O' takes 53GB of memory and hours to compile.

Very little documentation exists yet, try 'lang.html' for a brief tutorial.
The best way to get familiar with the language is to read the source code in
the 'self' directory, and browse over the files in "tests".

110523: you may now build with clang, highly recommended.  First,
  switch to the 'no-nested-funs' branch.  Clang can build -O2 in 8m,
  and -O3 in 10m, with less than 1G of memory.  [see the 'manual
  bootstrapping link above]

110326 Release Note: there is currently something very wrong with the
  combination of recursive types and rows, which shows up when using
  the new 'OO-like' feature (the '::' syntax).  It seems to be
  completely destroying all type safety.  So for now just stay away
  from that stuff until I can figure out what's going wrong.