grippy / yak

A toy programming language

Yak

A toy programming language inspired by bits of Rust, Go, Python, and JavaScript.

Syntax

See the syntax defined here.

Progress

1. Lexer
   • Done: Token parsing
   • Needs work:
     • Source code file, line, and column location
2. AST Parsing
   • See yak-ast TODO for done and needs work.
   • TBD: AST Validation
3. AST -> IR
   • Prototyped:
     • Modules
     • Functions
     • Structs
     • Constants
4. IR Validation
   • TBD: Type checks
5. IR -> LLVM
   • Prototyped:
     • Modules: generates module .ll files
     • Functions (stubbed)
     • Structs (stubbed)
     • Constants (stubbed)
6. Linking
   • Done: Links all .ll files and generates a package binary using clang

Unknowns

This list is some of the big unknowns to figure out...

• Memory management (gc vs lifetimes/borrow. Needs more research.)
• Memory layouts (can we leverage Rust for this?)
• String vs str: which one should we start with?
• Runtime (what does this look like? Make it synchronous and see if we can leverage Rust threads/channels to start out)

Env Variables

• YAK_HOME: The path to use for the yak home directory.
• YAK_LOG: The loglevel to use for the yak-cli binary.
• YAK_VERSION: The yak version to use for the yak-cli tools.

# Define which yak version to use:
export YAK_HOME="~/.yak"
export YAK_VERSION="0.0.1"
export PATH="$YAK_HOME/yak/$YAK_VERSION/bin:$PATH"

Yak Home

The yak home directory is where we store the versioned yak-cli binary, package src code, and compiled package cache.

By default, it should look like this:

~/.yak/yak/{version}
~/.yak/yak/{version}/bin
~/.yak/yak/{version}/pkg
~/.yak/yak/{version}/src

yak-cli

The crude beginnings of a cli have been stubbed out to support building and getting packages.

Build

Build the yak.pkg file in the current directory and resolve dependencies:

yak-cli build

Or, build some other local package relative to the current directory:

yak-cli build ../my/pkg1

Build artifacts should end up in the {pkg}/target/module and {pkg}/target/bin or {pkg}/target/lib directories.

Get

Download remote packages locally and build them.

yak-cli get https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grippy/yak/master/examples/yak-pkg1