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What, and why is Keel ?

Warning

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

Keel is a fast, statically-typed interpreted language that aims to combine Rust-like syntax with Python's ease-of-use.

Its goal is to provide a (much) faster alternative to Python that sits closer to low-level languages while remaining accessible to a wide audience. In other words, you should like Keel whether you're a seasoned Rust developer or you've barely touched Python and are completely new to programming.

Keel's main 'selling points' are:

  • ~10x faster than Python, competitive with LuaJIT (-joff)
  • Statically typed, with full type inference and zero annotations
  • FFI support, and the ability to call C/dynamic libraries directly from Keel with a native/easy syntax.
  • Embeddable in other programs through a C ABI.

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

Installation

On macOS / Linux

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

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

On Windows

Keel 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 keel command like any other:

  • To run the REPL, run: keel
  • To run a .kl file 1, run: keel file.kl
  • To display Keel's current version, run: keel -v or keel --version
  • To display the available commands, run: keel -h or keel --help

  1. Keel files have the .kl file extension. ↩