Ravi (a Lua 5.3 dialect) Alpha Release 0.24 with LLVM and Eclipse OMR JIT compilation support

Ravi (http://ravilang.org) is a dialect of Lua 5.3 with LLVM and Eclipse OMR based JIT compilers and limited optional static typing. I am pleased to announce that the alpha 0.24 release of Ravi is now available. Additionally, work is ongoing on creating a distribution of Ravi that includes high quality third-party libraries (https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/ravi-distro).

This release is aligned with Lua 5.3.4.

The main highlight of this release is that a new JIT backend based on a customized version of Eclipse OMR has been added. Note that this is in development and this is an early preview release.

The main advantages of the new Eclipse OMR JIT backend are:

• It is much smaller in size compared to LLVM
• It was designed to be a JIT rather than an AOT compiler
• Like LLVM it is an optimizing JIT compiler
• It is under active development and battle tested as part of the OpenJ9 project

For further details on how to build Ravi with Eclipse OMR support please visit:

• https://the-ravi-programming-language.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ravi-omr-instructions.html

For general information regarding Ravi please visit:

• https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/ravi
• https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/ravi-distro

All feedback welcome!

Thanks and Regards
Dibyendu