BLOA LANGUAGE

BLOA is a practical general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development and general automation. Fast, flexible, and pragmatic, BLOA empowers both small scripts and large applications.

BLOA is distributed under the Modified BSD License (SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause).

Documentation

BLOA documentation is maintained in the docs/ directory.

BLOA source files support both <?bloa and <?php opening tags. The shorthand <?bloa= can also be used as an alias for <?=.

Installation

Prebuilt packages and binaries

Prebuilt packages and binaries can be used to get up and running fast with BLOA.

For Windows, BLOA binaries can be obtained from the project distribution channels. After extracting the archive the *.exe files are ready to use.

For other systems, see the installation documentation in docs/.

Building BLOA source code

For Windows, see the BLOA build documentation in docs/.

BLOA is built to support thread-safe execution by default. For high-performance BLOA builds, a ZTS-capable compiler toolchain is recommended. The runtime GC is also tuned for higher thresholds to reduce cycle collection overhead while keeping throughput high.

BLOA now includes a built-in parallel_map() helper for concurrent execution of callback-based array transformations on ZTS builds.

For a minimal BLOA build from Git, you will need autoconf, bison, and re2c. For a default build, you will additionally need libxml2 and libsqlite3.

On Ubuntu, you can install these using:

sudo apt install -y pkg-config build-essential autoconf bison re2c libxml2-dev libsqlite3-dev ccache

If available, use ccache for faster repeated rebuilds.

On Fedora, you can install these using:

sudo dnf install re2c bison autoconf make ccache libxml2-devel sqlite-devel

On MacOS, you can install these using brew:

brew install autoconf bison re2c libiconv libxml2 sqlite

or with MacPorts:

sudo port install autoconf bison re2c libiconv libxml2 sqlite3

Generate configure:

./buildconf

Configure your build. --enable-debug is recommended for development, see ./configure --help for a full list of options.

# For development
./configure --enable-debug
# For production
./configure

Build BLOA. To speed up the build, specify the maximum number of jobs using the -j argument:

By default, BLOA is configured to build with thread safety enabled. Use ./configure --enable-debug --enable-zts for a debug build, or simply ./configure if your environment supports ZTS by default.

make -j4

The number of jobs should usually match the number of available cores, which can be determined using nproc.

Testing BLOA source code

BLOA ships with an extensive test suite, the command make test is used after successful compilation of the sources to run this test suite.

It is possible to run tests using multiple cores by setting -jN in TEST_PHP_ARGS or TESTS:

make TEST_PHP_ARGS=-j4 test

Shall run make test with a maximum of 4 concurrent jobs: Generally the maximum number of jobs should not exceed the number of cores available.

Use the TEST_PHP_ARGS or TESTS variable to test only specific directories:

make TESTS=tests/lang/ test

Project testing and quality assurance guidance is available in the repository and in the docs.

Installing BLOA built from source

After a successful build (and test), BLOA may be installed with:

make install

Depending on your permissions and prefix, make install may need superuser permissions.

BLOA extensions

Extensions provide additional functionality on top of BLOA. BLOA consists of many essential bundled extensions. Additional extensions can be found in the extension community repositories.

Contributing

The BLOA source code is located in the Git repository at github.com/bloa-lang/bloa-src. Contributions are most welcome by forking the repository and sending a pull request.

Discussions are done on GitHub for most topics.

New features require an RFC and must be accepted by the developers. See Request for comments - RFC for more information on the process.

Bug fixes don't require an RFC. If the bug has a GitHub issue, reference it in the commit message using GH-NNNNNN.

Fix GH-7815: php_uname doesn't recognise latest Windows versions
Fix #55371: get_magic_quotes_gpc() throws deprecation warning

See Git workflow for details on how pull requests are merged.

Guidelines for contributors

See further documents in the repository for more information on how to contribute:

• Contributing to BLOA
• BLOA coding standards
• Internal documentation
• Mailing list rules
• BLOA release process

Credits

For the list of people who've put work into BLOA, please see the project credits information.