RockstarLang/rockstar

Home of the Rockstar programming language

Source code at GitHub https://codewithrockstar.com/

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  "createdAt": "2018-07-21T16:10:34Z",
  "defaultBranch": "main",
  "description": "Home of the Rockstar programming language",
  "fullName": "RockstarLang/rockstar",
  "homepage": "https://codewithrockstar.com/",
  "language": "JavaScript",
  "name": "rockstar",
  "pushedAt": "2025-09-17T18:50:31Z",
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  "topics": [],
  "updatedAt": "2025-11-20T14:40:34Z",
  "url": "https://github.com/RockstarLang/rockstar"
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Do you wanna get rocked?

This is Rockstar, an esoteric programming language whose syntax is inspired by the lyrics to 80s hard rock and heavy metal songs.

![Rockstar Logotype]!(rockstar-logo-strapline-sticker.png)

What’s Here

Rockstar has three main components:

/Starship contains the Starship interpreter for Rockstar, built in C# and .NET
/cm-lang-rockstar contains the CodeMirror editor used on the Rockstar website
/codewithrockstar.com contains the Rockstar website, docs and examples

Building Rockstar

To build the Starship engine, you’ll need the .NET 9 SDK

git clone https://github.com/RockstarLang/rockstar.git
cd rockstar
dotnet workload install wasm-tools
dotnet build ./Starship/Starship.sln
dotnet test ./Starship/

To build a Rockstar native binary on Linux, you’ll need gcc installed, and then:

git clone https://github.com/RockstarLang/rockstar.git
cd rockstar
dotnet publish ./Starship/Rockstar -o binaries -c Release

That’ll create a standalone binary executable in binaries/rockstar.

The codewithrockstar.com website is built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages.

The embedded Rockstar interpreter is the Starship engine compiled to run on web assembly:

dotnet build ./Starship/Starship.sln
dotnet publish ./Starship/Rockstar.Wasm -o codewithrockstar.com/wasm/ -c Debug

Building with GitHub Actions

Building codewithrockstar.com works like this:

build-rockstar-2.0

runs on Linux
Builds the parser and interpreter
Runs the test suite
Uploads artifacts for:
- Linux native binary
- WASM interpreter for the website

build-windows-binary

builds the Rockstar windows binary

build-macos-binary

builds the macOS binary

release-rockstar-engine

creates the GitHub release from the latest binaries

build-and-deploy-website

Downloads the Rockstar WASM binary
builds the CodeMirror editor
Builds the Jekyll site
Deploys the site to GitHub Pages

Debug/Dev Mode Setup

In dev mode, I use symbolic directory links between the various parts of the project. Rebuilding the .NET solution will rebuild the WASM interpreter, which Jekyll can see as /wasm/**, and trigger a site rebuild, and all the Rockstar code examples are part of both the Rockstar.Test .NET test suite project and the codewithrockstar.com site:

> cd codewithrockstar.com
> mklink /d wasm ..\Starship\Rockstar.Wasm\bin\Debug\net8.0-browser
> mklink /d examples ..\Starship\Rockstar.Test\programs\examples

codewithrockstar.com
  /wasm --> [ /Starship/Rockstar.Wasm/bin/Debug/net8.0-browser ]
  /examples --> [ /Starship/Rockstar.Test/programs/examples ]
  /index.html
  /example.md
  /js
   /rockstar-editor.js (from codemirror)