General Information

Moon-Moon is an IRC bot run with the Lua programming language; however, the syntax used in the development version is called 'MoonScript' - this syntax can be compiled using Leafo's MoonScript program moonc and then loaded as Lua bytecode.

Lua

LuaRocks (recommended)

MoonScript

pgmoon

basexx

cqueues

luafilesystem

Getting Started

To install rocks locally, pass the --local flag to the luarocks command. This downloads and installs rocks to a local directory without requiring access to system directories. LuaRocks is recommended to allow for easy installation of all the required software.

$ luarocks install basexx
$ luarocks install cqueues
$ luarocks install luafilesystem
$ luarocks install moonscript

Lua is used as a configuration language; bots must each have their own separate .lua file in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/moonmoon (which defaults to $HOME/.config).

bot "#!" {
	server = "irc.hashbang.sh";
	port = 6697; -- TLS is automatically set if port == 6697
	autojoin = {
		"#!FusionScript";
	};
};

The Coroutine System

Moon Moon takes advantage of a coroutine-based asynchronous system which allows the software to have multiple things "running" at once - it's almost like having a threaded program, without threads. This offers some advantages:

1. A single Lua state
2. Fewer callbacks
3. Cleaner code base

Adding in a routine to the queue is simple, as demonstrated by the below examples programmed in MoonScript and Lua for convenience:

MoonScript

cqueues = require 'cqueues'
queue   = require 'queue'

queue\wrap ->
	while true
		cqueues.sleep 5
		print 'Hello, World!'

Lua

local cqueues = require("cqueues")
local queue   = require("queue")
queue:wrap(function()
	while true do
		cqueues.sleep(5)
		print("Hello, World!")
	end
end)