blakeohare

Unfortunately, not currently. I'd say of the missing "common" features that people expect out of languages, lambdas are next on my implementation list. But for the most part, my near-term goals are focused more on platform support (both the compiler and for exporting) and localization.

Alas, it's true. While the platforms Crayon programs can export to can run on Linux, the compiler itself was originally written in C# back when it was just a tinker-hobby project and does too many Windows-y things. The OSX support is based on Mono but is somewhat flakey in certain environments. Eventually I have plans to migrate the compiler to another language (possibly Crayon itself).

I will get right on that!

Hello, I'm actually the creator of Crayon and was surprised to find this showed up here.

Yes, the syntax very closely resembles JavaScript but there's more traits from static languages such as Java and less malleability than JS. For example libraries and dependencies are resolved at compile time and you can make it print out a tree of dependencies at compile time for use in environments that need to be properly sandboxed. Also, fields must be explicitly declared. This allows a lot more things like simple typos to be caught at compile time. The other thing is that it's export-ready for the platforms it supports. For example, when exporting to iOS, it generates a full XCode project. While this is similar to frameworks or languages like Cordova or Haxe, the thing that is unique to Crayon is the localizability of the language and libraries into non-English languages. This is still in the prototype phase, but currently works for Japanese and Spanish: https://crayonlang.org/gengo