stone

stone is a language. it has a built-in interpreter and compiler so you can choose to wait for the program to run or to build.

it is also optimized for developers to press the shift key as little as possible.

the documentation has a tutorial, a language reference, and development guides.

install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tarolling/stone/main/install.sh | sh

this downloads a prebuilt stone for linux or macos (x86-64 or arm64) into ~/.local/bin. pick another directory or release with sh -s -- --dir /usr/local/bin --version v0.1.0, or set STONE_INSTALL_DIR and STONE_VERSION.

to upgrade later, run stone self-update (or stone self-update --check to see if there is a new release).

stone run and stone check work everywhere, but stone build emits x86-64 assembly, so it needs x86-64 linux with gcc.

to build from source instead, with rust installed:

cargo install --git https://github.com/tarolling/stone stone

usage

cargo run --release -- run examples/basics.st                  # interpret
cargo run --release -- build examples/basics.st -o build/basics # compile (needs gcc)
./build/basics

stone <file> is shorthand for stone run <file>. build writes the assembly next to the executable (build/basics.s) and defaults to build/out.

layout

path	contents
src/	the stone library (lexer, parser, interpreter, codegen) and the CLI in main.rs
examples/	sample programs, each with the output it should print in a .out file
tests/programs/	small programs that each cover one feature, also with .out files
tests/programs.rs	runs every program above through both backends and compares output
docs/	architecture notes and the grammar (stone.gram, stone.asdl)
bench/	benchmarks comparing stone build with C and Python (see bench/README.md)

testing

cargo test

To add a golden test, drop name.st and name.out into tests/programs/ (or examples/). If a backend can't handle a program yet, list it in SKIPS in tests/programs.rs and give the reason.