Latria, a lightweight and embeddable scripting language.

Written by Ben Friedman, August 10th, 2016

For those lua fans out there here's another lightweight and embeddable C based language. This one is a bit interesting however. It's inspired by lua, but stripped down to a bare feature-minimal implementation. The result is an interpreter that weighs in around 100kb, and can even run faster than lua in some cases.

Latria has an interesting basis for it's structure, a bit old some may think but it's written according to ansi-c, or C90. For those that aren't familiar with this that's a standard that's over 25 years old! That's some pretty impressive reverse compatibility.

Considering how far back this goes, Latria can be built to run on just about anything. Whether it's Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS or that old computer that is still handling payments at your favorite bar. Chances are it's going to work. This is impressive, especially considering that C requires extra overhead for the compatibility involved to support cross compilation.

With any language that can run across platforms, such as Java, you have an added benefit of knowing that the code you write for it will run everywhere as well. Similar to Java, the Latria VM can run Latria code on anything you can setup Latria on. Latria scripts that are compiled are also compatible, and can be moved from machines of varying type and will run just fine.

With the rapid introduction of IOT devices of varying types, sizes and architectures it's becoming ever more critical that your software can work on it all. The days of designing with 1 platform in mind are becoming a thing of the past. Yet still platforms like Android and iOS do not encourage a singular 'across all platforms' design, instead splitting developers and their talents across borders and drawing lines. Not only is this alienating developers from potentially introducing radically new and improved software to new markets, it also limits the user's selection.

Although Microsoft, Apple and Google (collectively the Big 3) are developing relatively independent ecosystems they are starting to cover all types in their own worlds. This means from wearables, phones, tablets, computers and more you can write singular binaries that will work across most if not all of their products. This is a step in the right direction, but as long as development remains split across who's products you work with, languages like Latria will dominate the spectrum. It's a simple consideration of writing 1 versus 3 different times if you want to support the majority of markets available.

Writing platform specific code will almost always lead to a rewrite, that is if you really want to expand beyond the one market. And unless one company takes over the world, or your wallet becomes infinite, consider using platform agnostic languages like Latria to save your time and money. You can learn more about Latria at the official website latria.uphouseworks.com.

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