Esprime

Esprime is a cross-platform software framework and language designed for expressing, manipulating, and evaluating mathematical and logical expressions. It provides a compact syntax for building expression trees, supports symbolic algebra, and targets both embedding in host applications and standalone scripting.

Developed by the Esprime Project, the first stable release appeared in the mid-2010s, with subsequent major versions expanding the language syntax, adding a just-in-time compiler, and improving the optimizer. The project is maintained by a community of volunteers and distributed under an open-source license.

Core features include a functional-style core language with immutable data, type inference, and pattern-based matching; an expression runtime with lazy evaluation capable of short-circuiting; backends for interpretation and ahead-of-time compilation; bridges to C, Python, and JavaScript; and an optimizer that rewrites expressions to simplify and speed up evaluation.

Architecturally, Esprime separates the front end (parsing and type checking) from the runtime and optimizer; it supports extension through plugins to add new operators or data types; memory management uses a hybrid approach with reference counting and optional tracing garbage collection.

Use cases include symbolic computation in education and research, data transformation pipelines, rule-based reasoning systems, and as a domain-specific language for configuration and automation. The ecosystem provides libraries for numerical methods, algebraic manipulation, and data I/O, and it is used in both academic and industrial settings.

Reception has been mixed: praised for readability and extensibility, but critics point to a relatively small ecosystem compared with established languages and potential performance trade-offs in some workloads. Related topics include expression languages, symbolic computation systems, and domain-specific languages.