jlanguage

The J programming language, installable with pip. This is an unofficial packaging, not affiliated with Jsoftware: J's home page is jsoftware.com and its official source is jsoftware/jsource. These wheels repackage the official J binary releases, unmodified, so that pip install jlanguage gives you a working J on Linux (x86_64, aarch64), macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), and Windows (amd64, arm64).

Usage

pip install jlanguage
jconsole

That starts the standard J console REPL:

   +/ % # 1 2 3 4
0.25

python -m jlang does the same thing, useful when scripts aren't on your PATH. From Python, jlang.path() returns the install directory (containing bin/, system/, addons/, tools/) and jlang.jconsole_path() the full path to the executable.

Versioning

The package version is the J version: jlanguage 9.7.1 installs J 9.7.1. Packaging-only fixes are released as post versions (9.7.1.post1).

How it's built

make_wheels.py downloads each platform's release archive from jsoftware.com, verifies it against the published sha256sums, and writes it into a platform-tagged wheel, following the approach of ziglang/zig-pypi. Nothing is compiled and the binaries are byte-identical to the official ones.

License

J is © Jsoftware Inc. and distributed under the GPLv3 (see jsoftware/jsource). This package redistributes the official binaries unmodified.

Releasing a new version

When Jsoftware publishes a new J release:

1. Update JVER in make_wheels.py. The download URL is derived from it, so nothing else normally changes; do check the archive names against the install dir since the suffixes have changed between releases (9.6.3 used linux64, 9.7.1 uses linux).
2. Run python make_wheels.py. It downloads each platform archive (cached in downloads/), verifies it against the published sha256sums, and writes the wheels to dist/.
3. Run pytest -q, then twine upload dist/*.whl.

For a packaging-only fix to an already-released J version, append .postN to the version.