So I’ve spent a lot more time snooping around the Plutus github repo to see what is available to play with. There seems to be lots, but for the time being what I found most interesting is that they’ve already released 0.1.0 of PLC (Plutus Core Tool). This allows one to typecheck and evaluate Pluture Core code via an executable.
Long-story short you can clone the repo and run
nix build -f default.nix plutus-exe
or
stack build plutus-exe
In the case of using stack it deposits the binary plc into your local bin ready to use and in the case of nix it’s in the result folder that gets created.
Then you can evaluate code via feeding it a file or via cli:
echo "(program 0.1.0 [(lam i [(con integer) (con 0)] i) (con 12 ! 130000000000000000000000000000)])" | plc evaluate --stdin
You can get the docs for Plutus Core by building them from the repo or downloading them from here: https://hydra.iohk.io/build/318877
There’s more neat stuff such as a cardano wallet-api emulator and Plutus to Plutus Core generator but the PLC tool seems to be the most refined as of yet from my quick glance over.
I’ll probably spend some time going through the docs at some point and check out how the PL -> PLC works (I think Template Haskell?), but that’s it for now.