Bolt will be a programming language and compiler, intended to be a replacement for C in my own personal projects. For this reason it will largely be a general purpose language capable of tasks ranging from Kernel Development to App Development.
// A simple Hello, World program in Bolt.
import std
func<Int> main() {
print("Hello, World")
return 0
}
Bolt is still very much in its infancy. The language is still be fleshed out and designed. The ideas are changing and evolving almost daily. It is by no means ready for actual use.
I've made it publically viewable, either so people can get involved if they want to, or see the evolution of a new language and compiler. Will it ever match the popularity or usage of something like Rust, Swift, Python, etc... most likely not, but that's not why I'm developing it.
The current v0.0.1 of the compiler is capable of building a basic Hello, World program. This represents the first major milestone of the project. With that reach, my sights are now on the second major milestone. This includes improvements to the architecture of the compiler, adding the ability to use variadic arguments, better type coverage, compiler directives, arithmatic, bracketed expressions and order of operations.
Important: Details listed below may change quickly and frequently, and is meant to represent a general idea of the concepts employed by the project currently.
Bolt is primarily being designed to be readable and easily written. This is easier said than done, and will likely mean that the syntax of the language is changable for some time.
One of the concepts currently being played with is how types are associated to declarations. Take a the following declaration in C.
// Define foo to be an integer with value 50.
int foo = 50;This is quite a simple definition, and the type leads the definition. With bolt we'd write the same thing like
var<Int> foo = 50
This is a convention used throughout many declaration in Bolt. The root keyword of the declaration (var, let, func, etc) followed by the resulting type in angle brackets < >. The goal is that it should be easy to tell what type something ultimately is.
Bolt is provided under the MIT License, and thus free to use make use of in anyway you see fit. All that I ask is you provide the following license with any other versions of Bolt.
This license applies to the Compiler and the Standard Library of Bolt, but not the language itself... though I would ask for some form of attribution in any of implementation of the language.
Copyright (c) 2019 Tom Hancocks
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