Rless

Rless is a lightweight, declarative scripting language designed to be embedded in applications for configuration, data transformation, and rule-based automation. It emphasizes compact syntax, readability, and predictable evaluation, aiming to provide enough expressive power for common tasks without the complexity of a full general-purpose language.

Origins and scope: The project emerged from discussions about reducing boilerplate in configuration files and data workflows. Rless seeks a minimal yet expressive surface for typical tasks encountered in software deployments, data processing, and templating, without competing with more feature-rich languages.

Syntax and semantics: Rless uses a concise, human-friendly syntax and a core set of data types such as numbers, strings, booleans, lists, and maps. It supports variables, conditional evaluation, function calls, and simple iteration over collections. Functions are designed to be pure by default, with side effects restricted to explicit IO or mutation blocks, enabling easier reasoning and testing of rules.

Implementation and ecosystem: There are reference implementations in multiple host languages, including Rust, JavaScript, and Go, along with language bindings to common platforms. The standard library emphasizes data processing, JSON handling, string utilities, and date operations, providing reliable primitives for configuration, templating, and data workflows.

Usage and reception: Rless is primarily adopted for configuration files, lightweight data pipelines, and templating tasks within larger systems. It remains a niche tool, valued for its readability and compact syntax, while facing critique for its smaller ecosystem, limited tooling, and fewer learning resources compared with more established languages.