John Shutt's "Kernel" language implemented on ABE (C) 64-bit runtime. A previous implementation targeted 32-bit platforms.
This implementation is built in layers. The lowest layer is ABE, an Actor-Based Environment written in C. The actor design for the Kernel interpreter is based on a proof-of-concept written in Humus, and described in "Semantic Extensibility with Vau". In fact, most of the C code for the ABE actor behaviors is prefaced by corresponding Humus source (in comments). The result is an interpreter for a Kernel-inspired language, which reads from source files and the interactive console.
The Docker container environment provides a stable portable target platform for our project. Create a Docker image named abe64 in which to compile and run Kernel.
docker build -t abe64 .
Compile and test the abe and kernel programs within the abe64 Docker image.
docker run -v $(pwd):/src --rm -it abe64
Run the Kernel binary in iteractive mode.
docker run -v $(pwd):/src --rm -it abe64 ./kernel -i
There are a few Kernel source files (with .knl extensions) which may be pre-loaded into the environment by naming them on the command line. For example, library.knl contains standard library definitions.
docker run -v $(pwd):/src --rm -it abe64 ./kernel -i library.knl