Crochet

NOTE: Crochet is in early stages of development, there will be a lot of breaking changes here as I figure out what kind of language fits the games I want to create, and how to generalise that.

Crochet is a tool designed for creating and remixing interactive media safely. It is best thought as targeting the domains of Interactive Fiction, Simulation Games, Software Verification, and Interactive/Live Language Tooling.

Documentation

The documentation books on Crochet are a work in progress, you can find them in the Crochet documentation website.

Currently there's:

• A reference book, which discusses the concepts and design philosophy of Crochet;
• A syntax cheatsheet, which just lists all syntactical forms with examples; and
• A contribution book, which describes how to contribute to Crochet.

Installing Crochet

For now, you can install Crochet from npm. You want the @qteatime/crochet package with the experimental flag:

$ npm install @qteatime/crochet@experimental

You can also compile it from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/qteatime/crochet.git
$ cd crochet
$ npm install
$ node make build

See crochet --help (or ./node_modules/.bin/crochet --help if you've installed it locally) for usage information.

Playground

You can try programming interactively with the Playground. You can run with:

$ crochet playground <path/to/your/crochet.json>

For node projects you need to specify node as your Playground execution target, since the default is running the package in the browser:

$ crochet playground <path/to/your/crochet.json> --target node

You do need to specify a package because that's how Crochet tracks dependencies and capabilities. All code you type in the Playground will be executed in the context of the given package. And all dependencies of that package will be loaded first.

The Playground accepts both declarations and statements/expressions.

API Reference

You can get a reference documentation page on any package by using the docs command. E.g.:

$ crochet docs <path/to/crochet.core/crochet.json>

You'll be able to navigate through the documentation by accessing http://localhost:8080 in your browser.

Running packages

You can run a Crochet package on the terminal by using the run command. E.g.:

$ crochet run <path/to/your/crochet.json> -- argument1 argument2

Anything after -- is passed as the invocation arguments as-is to your package. You must provide a command called main: _, where the only parameter will be this list of command line arguments.

Web packages are currently run with the run-web command. This does not accept any invocation arguments:

$ crochet run-web <path/to/your/crochet.json>

You can provide a different port with --port 12345. Currently the server is started on port 8000, and Crochet does not try to find an available port if that one is taken.

Licence

Copyright (c) 2021 Niini
Licensed under the permissive MIT licence.