Hi everyone!

After receiving a few issues and PR on ArkScript repositories, I figured that it could be a great idea to make a short guide (+ a presentation of the project) on how to make a quality contribution.

What is ArkScript?

ArkScript is a small, fast and functional scripting language for C++ projects, inspired by Lisp, running on its own virtual machine.

Our goal is to make a language with few keywords (if a language has too many, it's a bad practice because they are trying to fix things by adding new "features"), which nearly anyone can understand. Indeed, if you understand that everything after a ( is a function, you understand the whole language.

ArkScript is not just the compiler and virtual machine, it's also a package manager, nuclear, benchmarks against other languages, a growing standard library, and much more!

Quality contributions

Those are meaningful updates to any of those projects, thus not things like correcting indentation, adding two words on a README.md, adding an unrelated file to a project.

Alas those were the kind of PR (not all of them luckily) I received this morning, people being greedy for easy PR for the Hacktoberfest.

We have plenty of issues all over our repositories, even simple ones like:

• nuclear (package manager)
  • Downloading a tar from Github
  • [Generating the package list file after installing a package)(https://github.com/ArkScript-lang/nuclear/issues/4)
• standard library
  • How to improve - thread, leading to more PR
• Ark (the core of the language)
  • More examples
  • Improving the bytecode reader CLI
  • Fixing the lexer error reporter
• modules (C++ code loaded by the virtual machine to extend its capabilities)
  • A bunch of small modules to add, from crypto functions, to mysql binding
• ArkScript-VSC (a visual studio code extension for coloration)
  • Adding ArkScript icon to ArkScript files
  • Adding code snippets when writing a triple #
• benchmarks
  • Adding more benchmarks

So here we are, useful contributions would qualify as contributions adding something important to a project, fixing a bug, adding a functionnality.

Happy Hacktoberfest everyone!