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What is Candela, and why?

Warning

Candela is experimental and under active development (this documentation too). Little is set in stone.

Candela is a fast, statically-typed interpreted language that combines Rust-like syntax with Python's ease of use.

It aims to be a much faster alternative to Python that sits closer to low-level languages while staying approachable. You should like Candela whether you are a seasoned Rust developer or you have barely touched Python and are new to programming.

Candela's main selling points are:

  • About 10x faster than Python and competitive with LuaJIT (-joff) in our benchmarks
  • Statically typed, with full type inference and zero annotations
  • FFI support: call C and dynamic libraries directly from Candela with a native, easy syntax
  • Embeddable in other programs through a C ABI and a Rust host API

The goal of this documentation / tutorial is to show Candela's syntax and how it works by example more than by theory.

Installation

On macOS / Linux

Candela provides a macOS / Linux installer, which you can use to download and install Candela by running the following command in your terminal:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lumen-fx/candela/main/install.sh | sh

This will install the latest Candela version in Library/Candela on macOS, and in /usr/local/lib/candela/ on Linux.

On Windows

Candela doesn't provide a Windows installer yet. You must manually download it from the latest release on GitHub.

Usage

Once installed, you can use the candela command like any other:

  • To run the REPL, run: candela
  • To run a .cdl file 1, run: candela file.cdl
  • To display Candela's current version, run: candela -v or candela --version
  • To display the available commands, run: candela -h or candela --help

Benchmarks

Candela benchmarks

  1. Candela files have the .cdl file extension. ↩