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Aspects
Class-based, straight-ahead object-oriented script language. Syntax is influenced by Ruby language (and by Go a bit), but has been condensed and simplified (and slightly modified) to keep Goby VM simple and concise. Several aspects of Ruby such as meta-programming (known as 'magic'), special variables with $, have been dropped for now, but note that we might resurrect some of them with a different form or implementation in the future.
Single inheritance. Module is supported for mixin with #include or #extend. Defining singleton class and singleton method are also supported. Goby has two kinds of class internally: native class and standard class. Native class (or builtin class) provides fundamental classes such as Array or String. Object class is a superclass of any other native/standard classes including Class class. Class class contains most common methods such as #puts. Standard class (or standard library) can be loaded via require and provides additional methods. Standard classes are often split internal Go code and external Goby code in order to make implementation easier. Both kinds of class are transparent to Goby developers and can be overridden by child classes. Any classes including Class class are under Object class.
Consists of AST, lexer, parser, and token, which of the structure is pretty conventional and should be familiar to language creators. These components are all written in 100% pure Go, instead of using conventional static yacc/lex/bison conversion with a mess of ad-hoc macros. This makes Goby's codes far smaller, concise, and legible. You can inspect, maintain, or improve Goby codes more easily, being free from pains like C/C++ era.
YARV-conscious, including stack and call_frame, as well as containing Goby's native classes and some standard library and additional components. All are written in Go as well.
Built-in monolithic Go binary executable which equips several native features such as a robust thread/channel mechanism powered by goroutine, a very new experimental Plugin system to manage existing Go packages dynamically from Goby codes, igb (REPL) powered by readline package. Goby contains some standard or third-party Go packages, but the dependency to them is not high. These packages contain no CGO codes (at least by now) thus cross-compile for any OS environments that Go supports should work fine.
Provides some lean but sufficient standard libraries to support developers, including threaded high-performance HTTP server, DB adapter, file or JSON. Curiously, most of them are split into Go and Goby codes, and Goby codes are not within Goby executable but placed under lib directory as Goby script files. Of course you can create custom libraries and include them to your codes. Thanks to the flexibility of Plugin system, we expect that you can quickly import most of the existing Go packages to your Goby scripts without creating additional libraries from scratch in almost all cases.