Bootlang
Our goal is to create a self bootstraped programming language. The language should use fairly modern features, but remain as simple as possible.
Our feature wishlist:
- First class functions;
- sum and prod types;
- type access control;
- constant binding by default and imutable if possible;
- pattern matching;
- Interface based polymorphism;
- Generic types;
- Extension methods;
- a simple Directional Acyclic graph based module system.
Methodology
The translator is built in stages. The stage0 recognize just enough syntax to be considered Turing complete. It has support to only ints, string and Boolean, and types composed over them. The stageL supports the complete language.
Road to Stage0
These steps decribe an initial nodejs based interpreter with just enough functionality to be able to compile itself. So we can delay support for interfaces, generics and so on and focus on the most basic features:
- String support (at least with compare, concat and slice methods);
- Integer support, with at least add and multiply methods, for obvious reasons;
- Boolean support, to avoid horrible hacks like
1=trueand0=false; - Reading and writing input/output;
- Converting between the types.
On this guide we will post some intermediary code, the complete source is to be found on src/boot0. The tests/boot0/*.blang
Lesson1
This lesson is dedicated to prepare all machinery to do a simple hello world. The basic the setup is covered here too.
Lesson2
This lesson is dedicated the configuration of our builtin types.
Lesson3
This lesson is about variables
Lesson4
This is for control flow.
Stage1
After that we have a basic capable interpretor for a turing complete language. So we going to start building a compiler using the language itself. This compiler, called stage1 is very basic and only exists to kickoff the later versions.