luminalang / lumina

WIP High-Level Functional Programming Language Focused On Efficiency

Running

Currently there's two native targets with basic support. Glibc and statically linked Linux with raw syscalls. The default as glibc.

See compile-then-link-to-libc-and-run.sh for help.

To use the syscall backend, you need to assemble the appropriate file(s) in assembly/ to object files with the same name. nasm -o x86_64-linux-syscall.o x86_64-linux-syscall.asm

Logging

This project is using tracing_tree combined with env_logger. To track a specific entity throughout the compilation pipeline, use: RUST_LOG="[{entity=myFunction}]=trace"

To get an overview look of what the compilers doing then use RUST_LOG=info

Status

Most language features, basic and advanced, lower to LIR and can compile natively with Cranelift. The main blocker right now is the lack of a finished garbage collector. All allocations currently leak unless manually freed with do libc:free ptr then .... String literals currently just lower to global static data and yields a raw pointer. Garbage collector is the blocker for proper strings.

C-representation of declared data is currently not supported. To call FFI functions you need to write in primitives manually according to the C-abi. Lumina's own ABI is currently a transparent representation of the data given. So; the C ABI can be followed manully on top.

Known remaining major tasks for public release

• Garbage Collector
• Basic guide/showcase
• Replace all remaining todo!("ET: ");s with proper error messages
• Give the compiler the ability to detect and use system linkers
• Vectorised linked lists or finger trees as default list desugaring
• Fix the type checker sometimes confusing the expected type with the given type and vice-versa
• Basic Windows target
• Basic MacOS target
• Basic introductory website hosted on our domain
• Re-add the unreachability warning messages
• Strings
• Basic standard library

Known remaining major tasks for after public release

• Associated types
• Trait-overloaded key-value syntactic sugar for hashmaps
• Higher kinded types (monomorphised)
• Documentation Generator
• @[repr "C"] attributes and FFI-binding generator
• Incremental compilation
• Self-hosted compiler reimplementation
• Stack backtraces and runtime debugging
• Code formatter
• Syntax files for various text editors
• Specialisation and compile-time type reflection (plan is to use this instead of macros)

Known remaining minor tasks for after public release

• Inline smaller sum-type data payloads for increased performance
• Natively aligned data for improved performance
• Stable public function symbols