Terra currently runs Mac OS X, Linux, and 64-bit Windows.
Like C, Terra is a simple, statically-typed, compiled language with manual memory management. But unlike C, it is designed from the beginning to interoperate with Lua. Terra functions are first-class Lua values created using the terra keyword. When needed they are JIT-compiled to machine code.
You can use Terra and Lua as…
1. A scripting-language with high-performance extensions.
2. An embedded JIT-compiler for building languages.
3. A stand-alone low-level language.
This means that Terra code performs similarly to equivalent C code. For instance, our translations of the nbody and fannhakunen programs from the programming language shootout perform within 5% of the speed of their C equivalents when compiled with Clang, LLVM’s C frontend. Terra also includes built-in support for SIMD operations, and other low-level features like non-temporal writes and prefetches.
To simplify meta-programming, Lua and Terra share the same lexical environment, but, to ensure performance, Terra code can execute independently of Lua’s runtime. We evaluate our design by reimplementing existing multi-language systems entirely in Terra. Our Terra-based auto-tuner for BLAS routines performs within 20% of ATLAS, and our DSL for stencil computations runs 2.3x faster than hand-written C.
http://terralang.org/
