JacksonTian / gypsum

An experimental new programming language

Introduction

Gypsum is an experimental new programming language. In the future, it will be useful for developing high-performance desktop and web applications and games.

Gypsum is a compiled, statically-typed, object-oriented language. Once the compiler is more fully implemented, it will be functional as well. The compiler generates bytecode for a virtual machine, CodeSwitch. CodeSwitch currently provides basic interpretation and memory management. Eventually, it will have an optimizing JIT compiler and will be able to execute bytecode for other languages.

The syntax of Gypsum is inspired by Python and Scala. It is designed to be simple, requiring less extraneous punctuation than most languages. Here's how "hello world" is written:

def main =
  print("Hello, world!\n")

You can find several simple programs in the examples directory.

Projects

Compiler

The Gypsum bootstrap compiler can be found in the compiler directory. It is written in Python (2.7). Once the language is mostly complete, the compiler will be rewritten in Gypsum.

To run the compiler:

cd compiler
./compiler program.gy -o program.csp

To test the compiler:

python -m unittest discover

Virtual machine

The CodeSwitch virtual machine can be found in the vm directory. It is intended to be minimal. Currently, it can load packages (.csp files), manage memory (including a basic copying garbage collector), and interpret bytecode (with a simple switch loop).

To build and test the VM:

cd vm
make -j8

To run a package:

out/driver program.csp

Other goodies

An experimental Emacs major mode for Gypsum is in tools/gypsum-mode.el. It provides basic syntax highlighting.

To install, use M-x package-install-file, then add this to your .emacs:

(require 'gypsum-mode)

Dependencies

• Python 2.7 is needed to run the compiler and to generate some files needed for CodeSwitch.
• PyYAML is needed to parse some data files needed for the Gypsum compiler and for CodeSwitch.
• G++ 4.8 or any other C++ compiler which supports C++11 is needed to build CodeSwitch. Other binutils are assumed as well.
• GNU Make 3.81 is needed to build CodeSwitch.

Gypsum and CodeSwitch were developed and tested on Ubuntu 13.10. They will hopefully work on other platforms with minimal modification, but nothing else is supported right now.