Boa is general-purpose scripting language, with all the bells and whistles of a modern language, with special focus on support for one-liners, batch scripting, et cetera. Boa uses a register-based VM, with a memory pool allocator (based on LuaJIT's ljalloc.h), and

• is easy to extend
• native-function callbacks are non-nonsensical. you don't need to worry about any stacks, the VM handles it for you
• full support for try catch finally with builtin Fiber
• written in C, but with C++ compatibility in mind. that is to say, the sources compile cleanly as C++
• memory pool can be disabled through command line flags
• very fast, even with optimizations disabled

TODO:

- module support. currently, `require` is extremely ad-hoc. but, let's not overdo it either.
- event processing. could be done with coro, possibly.
- FFI support. sadly, libffi is not easily integrated in an existing build structure that tries to remain simple. maybe dyncall, or something else.
- less reasonable: compile to VM-specific assembly; conceptually, it would be as if compiling to bytecode, just, y'know textual.. with an additional parser.