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wick

The wick is the part of the lantern that carries the flame.

wick is the lantern engine's own scripting language: Lua's size and feel, with the sharp edges designed out at the language level. The whole implementation — lexer, one-pass typed compiler, bytecode, stack VM, garbage collector — is a small dependency-free C++ implementation, open source under the zlib license, living in the engine repo at wick/.

// a complete lantern game in wick
let best = num(lt.load_save("best") ?? "") ?? 0

fn update(dt: num) {
  if lt.pressed("z") {
    best = best + 1
    lt.save("best", str(best))
  }
}

fn draw() {
  lt.clear(0.1, 0.1, 0.2)
  lt.print("BEST " + str(best), 4, 4, 1, 1, 1, 1)
}

Why a new language

wick exists because we shipped real games in Lua and catalogued what hurt. Each pain became a design decision, not a lint rule:

Lua pain wick answer
nil errors at runtime Static types + T? optionals — unchecked use doesn't compile
typos create silent globals Locals only — undeclared assignment is a compile error
1-based indexing, no continue 0-based [ ], continue, len(x)
"" and 0 are truthy Conditions must be bool
GC pauses mid-frame Collection runs between frames only
stack-index C bindings Engine calls type-checked at compile time
math.random differs by machine rand() is a fixed xorshift — deterministic everywhere
JIT forbidden on iOS No JIT anywhere — specialized bytecode from static types
parallel-list entity tables Flat records + list<record> when evidence appears

The flagship proofs: Lantern Night ships in both languages (Lua / wick) side by side; KORA on lantern is wick-only and exercises records, nested .lant packages, and scene packaging.

New in 0.3

Bits, bytes, and words: masks, shifts, wrapping and register labels, with an interactive Bit Lab example. Read the release post.

Where to start

WickA Famemu projectLantern source