diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'doc/goals.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/goals.txt | 52 |
1 files changed, 40 insertions, 12 deletions
diff --git a/doc/goals.txt b/doc/goals.txt index 620438c..5ce3473 100644 --- a/doc/goals.txt +++ b/doc/goals.txt @@ -1,4 +1,13 @@ -a loose collection of goals and ideas for this as-yet-unnamed language +a loose collection of goals and ideas for this as-yet-unnamed language. the +main goal is really just (a) to have fun, and (b) to make a c replacement that +provides the things i personally wish the language was better on. + +* very small, self-contained executables + + hello world should ideally be on the order of a couple kilobytes + + only functions which get referenced from main (and so on recursively) + get any code generated, even for the stdlib + + favor size over performance where reasonable + + effectively no language runtime * fast compilation + grammar must be very easy to parse @@ -8,12 +17,6 @@ a loose collection of goals and ideas for this as-yet-unnamed language + in general: - the most important thing for coding to be fun is a tight feedback loop -* very small, self-contained executables - + hello world should ideally be on the order of a couple kilobytes - + only functions which get referenced from main (and so on recursively) - get any code generated, even for the stdlib - + favor size over performance where reasonable - * explicit + procedures that allocate should have an arena parameter + no operator overloading, but builtin vector/matrix types (eventually) @@ -41,22 +44,47 @@ a loose collection of goals and ideas for this as-yet-unnamed language - let x = y - can do like .ENUM_NAME when expecting an enum value, even though otherwise it's `let x = EnumType.ENUM_NAME` + + pascal-style postfix dereference, no need for a->b or (*a).b + - possibly also auto-dereference when accessing fields * c interop + + c type aliases in stdlib + + can turn off name mangling on exported identifiers + ability to specify different calling conventions on: - functions imported from outside - functions exported -* types and procedures in any order - + this goal can be thrown out if it turns out to slow down the compiler - - but finding these first allows to hand all procedures to a thread pool - for parsing and optimization - + removes the need for function prototypes, opaque structs, etc. +* better module system than c + + proper module import, no header files + + types and procedures in any order + - can be thrown out if it turns out to slow down the compiler, but + finding these first allows to hand all procedures to a thread pool for + parsing and optimization + - removes the need for function prototypes, opaque structs, etc. + like in odin, all files in a directory are compiled together and have the same toplevel scope; to isolate things in a package, put them in a different directory + + no A::B like in c++ or rust, just a normal A.B * portable + should be as easy as possible (like that's saying much...) to port to new platforms + at minimum support amd64 and wasm + - try and make it work with windows + consider having a version of the compiler which uses LLVM for release builds + +* useful + + not just a toy language! + + begin dogfooding with it as soon as that's viable + + write a text editor, develop the compiler with that + + eventually bootstrap into a self-hosting one, maybe + + utility procedures in the standard library + - string manipulation: searching, splitting, comparing, etc. + - utf8 encoding & decoding + - libc bindings + - command-line argument parsing + - consistent allocator interface + - arena allocators + - memory context allocator (like c# autorelease pool) + - file i/o, can read whole thing into string easily + + try to get _reasonable_ levels of optimization, within the constraints of + simplicity and very fast compilation |