EcoRE - The Ecosphere Runtime Environment

This is EcoRE, my little programming language playground that I've been working on in my spare time since 2020.

It acts as a virtual machine and runtime environment for my programming language Eco, which is a language inspired by Self.

I shared the inspiration for this project in an E-Mail to the mailing list of the Self programming language.

Disclaimer

This implementation was designed for experimental purposes only, and will be superseded by improved VMs in the future. It is in no way fit for any productive use.

The repository contains some undocumented, outdated and buggy files and features.

Features and Scope

EcoRE is capable of executing a graphical programming environment for the Eco programming language, supporting:

A Morphic-like user interface
Image-based persistence
Automatic garbage collection
Interactive code editing
Decompilation of bytecodes
Draggable objects
Outliners and Reflection
Code reloading
Seamless FFI calls to various libraries

Planned and partially implemented features are:

Extracting FFI information from DWARF debugging data
Python interop
Distributed objects and networking support
Multiple languages sharing the same object space (Eco, Smalltalk, Lisp)
Support for virtual reality and a 3D user interface
A presentation mechanism similar to McCLIM

Building and Running EcoRE

If you are using Debian or Fedora, it should be enough to type

make install-deps
make run

while in the toplevel directory of the repository and the system will take care of the rest.

EcoRE depends on:

SDL2
- SDL2
- SDL2_ttf
- SDL2_image
- SDL2_gfx
zlib
libffi

In order to create the bootstrap image, you also need Python (version 3).

You might have to change a few things in order to get it to run on your machine.

Once the VM has started, you will be greeted by a black loading screen. The loading process takes about one minute, depending on your hardware. After that, the main menu will open:

You can now choose between

Outliner to examine and modify the current session object (for debugging purposes)
Files to load Eco files from the disk
Apps to try out various programs written in Eco
New to start a shell or an editor (a context menu will open)

To close the session, press Shift+Esc.