Io programming language

Io is an open source command-line software that provides a small, simple, cross-platform and well suited dynamic prototype-based programming language targeted at embedded devices. It supports the Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

It’s inspired by several programming languages

Io is a pure object language inspired by Smalltalk, NewtonScript, Act1, LISP, Lua and Self programming languages. It has a small memory footprint and it’s reasonably fast, when compared to Python, Perl or Ruby.

Key features include an incremental garbage collector (weak links supported), a differential prototype-based object model, exceptions, dynamic typing, ANSI C implementation, multi-state, actor-based concurrency, and 64-bit clean.

Installing Io

Before attempting to install Io on your GNU/Linux operating system, please make sure that you have the yajl, libevent, CMake and PCRE package installed. Then, grab the latest release of the software from either Softoware or the project’s homepage (see link at the end of the article) and save it somewhere on your computer.

Extract the contents of the archive with your favorite archive manager utility, open a terminal emulator program, move to the location where you’ve extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softoware/io-2013.12.04) and run the ‘cmake .’ command to configure the project, followed by the ‘make’ command to compile it.

After a successful compilation process, you will be able to install Io system wide and make it available to all users on your machine by running the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user.

Gettings started with Io

To learn how to use the Io programming language, open your favorite Terminal app and run the ‘io -h’ command, which will display the usage message, as well as available command-line options, such as the ability to evaluate a given expression and run the interpreter after processing the files passed.

Requirements:

• yajl
• libevent
• PCRE