Terra (programming language)

Like C/C++, Terra is a statically-typed, compiled language with manual memory management. But unlike C/C++, it is designed from the beginning to be meta-programmed from Lua.

The design of Terra comes from the realization that C/C++ is really composed of multiple “languages.” It has a core language of operators, control-flow, and functions calls, but surrounding this language is a meta-language composed of a mix of features such as the pre-processor, templating system, and struct definitions. Templates alone are Turing-complete and have been used to produce optimized libraries such as Eigen, but are horrible to use in practice.

In Terra, we just gave in to the trend of making the meta-language of C/C++ more powerful and replaced it with a real programming language, Lua.

The combination of a low-level language meta-programmed by a high-level scripting language allows many behaviors that are not possible in other systems. Unlike C/C++, Terra code can be JIT-compiled and run interleaved with Lua evaluation, making it easy to write software libraries that depend on runtime code generation.