Jactl is a powerful scripting language for the JVM platform whose syntax is a combination of bits from Java, Groovy, and Perl. It can be run from a REPL and from the commandline for commandline scripts but its main goal is to be integrated into Java applications and provide a secure, locked-down mechanism that customers/users can use to customise the application behaviour.

It is especially suited to event-loop/reactive applications due to its built-in suspend/resume mechanism based on continuations that ensures it never blocks the execution thread on which it is running.

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I wanted a language that was a joy to code in, was easy for Java programmers to pick up, provided a secure extension mechanism for applications, and was non-blocking. Nothing I found satisfied all these needs, and so Jactl was born.

See the FAQ for a more detailed answer and answers to other questions.

Jactl syntax is concise and is mostly just a subset of Java and Groovy syntax with a bit of Perl thrown in for good measure, so it is easy to pick up for anyone familiar with Java:

int fib(int x) {
  return x <= 2 ? 1 : fib(x-1) + fib(x-2);
}
println 'fib(20) = ' + fib(20);

Jactl adopts a lot of Groovy syntax so semicolons are optional, typing is optional, double-quoted strings allow for embedded expressions, and return is optional for the last expression of a function so the previous example could also be written like this:

def fib(x) { x <= 2 ? 1 : fib(x-1) + fib(x-2) }
println "fib(20) = ${fib(20)}"

Jactl is a multi-paradigm language and so has both Object Oriented and Functional programming features. Here is an example showing a more functional programming approach using some built-in higher-order functions and built-in regex support to take a file of markdown, extract the top level headings, and generate a table of contents:

// Sanitise text to make suitable for a link
def linkify = { s/ /-/g;  s/[^\w-]//g }

// Find all top level headings in input and generate markdown for table of contents:
stream(nextLine).filter{ /^# /r }
                .map{ $1 if /^# (.*)/r }
                .map{ "* [$it](#${ linkify(it.toLowerCase()) })" }
                .each{ println it }

Another example showing Jactl's pattern matching with destructuring:

switch (x) {
  /X=(\d+),Y=(\d+)/n ->  $1 + $2   // regex match with capture vars
  [1,*]              -> 'matched'  // list whose first element is 1
  [_,_]              -> 'matched'  // list with 2 elements
  [int,String,_]     -> 'matched'  // 3 element list. 1st is an int, 2nd is a String
  [a,_,a]            -> a * 2      // 1st and last elements the same in 3 element list
  [a,*,a] if a < 10  -> a * 3      // list with at least 2 elements. 1st and last the same and < 10
  [a,${2*a},${3*a}]  -> a          // match if list is of form [2,4,6] or [3,6,9] etc
  [a,b,c,d]          -> a+b+c+d    // 4 element list
}

A simple quicksort:

def qsort(x) {
  switch (x) {
    [],[_] -> x
    [h,*t] -> qsort(t.filter{it < h}) + h + qsort(t.filter{it >= h})
  }
}

See Language Features for more language features and examples.

Jactl scripts compile to bytecode to take advantage of the performance capabilities of the JVM.

Compatible with Java 8 and later versions.

There is an IntelliJ plugin that supports syntax colouring, auto-indenting, completions, find definition/usages, running scripts, debugging scripts, and more. See IntelliJ Plugin for more details.

Jactl never blocks the execution thread on which a script is running. This is to support execution in reactive or event loop based applications.

Blocking operations in Jactl can only occur when invoking a blocking/asynchronous function. When executing such a function, the script will be suspended and when the blocking function completes, the script execution state is resumed from the point at which it was suspended. This is done via an internal continuation mechanism.

Script-writers can write their code as though it blocks and do not have to be concerned about which functions are asynchronous and which are synchronous or have to jump through the normal asynchronous programming hoops with the use of callbacks to be invoked after a long-running operation completes.

When a blocking operation is invoked, Jactl creates a Continuation object that captures the state of the running script such as the value of all local variables and the current call stack. When the long-running operation completes, the script state is restored and the script continues from where it left off.

The execution state of a script can be checkpointed when needed and this checkpointed state can be persisted or distibuted over a network in order to recover and resume scripts after a failure.

Easy to integrate additional functions and methods into the language for application-specific needs.

Unlike many other JVM based languages, in Jactl the things that a script writer can do are tightly controlled. The only things available to the script writer are the built-in functions and the functions that you provide. This allows Jactl scripts to be safely executed in frameworks where creating threads, writing to files, connecting to remote systems, and performing other blocking operations would not normally be allowed.

When you integrate the Jactl compiler into your application you provide it with the functions that you want your script writers to have access to and this ensures they can only do things that you permit them to do. This means you don't need to worry about them accessing files or data that they shouldn't be accessing, for example.

The core Jactl language has no dependencies on external libraries apart from the ASM library which it embeds within itself after renaming (to avoid clashes with any other instance of ASM on the classpath).

The language allows you to choose whether to specify a type for your variables, parameters, and return types. You can choose to provide types for stricter type checking or for optimisation reasons, or you can leave things dynamically typed.

Jactl has a REPL (Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop) to allow you to easily play with the language and prototype code at the commandline.

Jactl scripts can be run from the commandline to replace use of various Unix utilities such as awk, sed, or even Perl.

• Closures
• Functional programming
  • Functions as values
  • Higher-order functions
  • Map, filter, collect, each, etc.
  • Pattern matching with destructuring
• Classes with inheritance
• Strong/weak typing
• Parameters with default values
• Named parameters for function calls
• Multi-line strings
• Strings with interpolated expressions
• Regex matching syntax
• Regex capture variables

See Language Features for an overview with examples of the language features.

To run command line scripts you only need the Jactl jar which can be downloaded from Maven Central: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/io/jactl/jactl/2.1.0/jactl-2.1.0.jar

To download the Jactl REPL, which gives you an interactive shell for trying out Jactl code, see the jactl-repl project.

• Java 8+
• Gradle 8.0.2
• ASM 9.6

Download the source code from GitHub as a zip file or use git to clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/jaccomoc/jactl.git
cd jactl
./gradlew build

That will build jactl-${VERSION}.jar under the build/libs directory where ${VERSION} is the current version or whatever version you have downloaded/checked out.

To push to your Maven repository you can use publishToMaven:

./gradlew build publishToMaven

To use Jactl you will need to add a dependency on the Jactl library.

In the dependencies section of your build.gradle file:

implementation group: 'io.jactl', name: 'jactl', version: '2.1.0'

In the dependencies section of your pom.xml:

<dependency>
 <groupId>io.jactl</groupId>
 <artifactId>jactl</artifactId>
 <version>2.1.0</version>
</dependency>

The Jactl Documentation Site has the complete documentation including a language guide, and an integration guide. It should be your first port of call.

Related GitHub projects:

• The Jactl REPL project provides a simple Read-Eval-Print-Loop shell for running Jactl code interactively.
• The Jactl-Vertx library provides some basic Vert.x integration capabilities.