Snow*

ℹ️ Table of content

1. What is Snow* ?

2. Me, Mesabloo

3. Free sample

4. Thanks to

5. Software used

❔ What is Snow* ?

Snow* is a programming language which knew several generations:

• The first one called RainDrop was an Object-Oriented programming language.
  It really never took off in the first place, being always a theoritical project more than anything else.

• The second one was called #* (SharpStar)
  It was an ASM-like language with some inconsistences (registers holding only up to one value).
  It was the real first programming language made here from nothing. The VM was slow, the compiler inefficient.

• The third generation was the first called Snow*.
  It was still an ASM-like, but more developped than the previous one. It contained more instructions, the VM was faster, the compiler more efficient.

• The fourth generation, Snow*, a procedural programming language.
  This generation is built with ANTLR and LLVM to offer power and native compilation.

🖥️ Behind Snow*, a developer, Mesabloo.

I've been working on Snow* from the second generation until now since the beginning of June 2018. I wanted to create my own programming language since the beginning of October/November of 2017. (RainDrop came to life around this time) Because I never really understood how they work, and because I wanted to compile RainDrop into ASM (the Assembly Language), it didn't go far enough to actually be considered a good "experience" (just a basic Lexer + a simple compiling process until the AST generation, where I got stuck).
After this, I switched from Java to C++ and completely changed the syntax of the language, creating my first "ASM-like" language.
And now, I changed it again, and I'm ready to go for it.

📄 What about a free sample ?

Samples can be found here but I will post here a simple Hello, World! program made in Snow*:

(*
 *  Declaration of the main method. The parameters of it are unrequired, you may write it without.
 *
 *  @param `argc` is of type i8 ;
 *  @param `argv` is of type array<str> ;
 *  @return i32
 *)

% So that we can use `print()`.
import stdout;
import array;

i32(i8, array<str>) main =
    (i8 argc, array<str> argv) => {
        print("Hello, World!");
        % We print "Hello, World!" in the console.
        return 0;
        % We return from the function, with an i32 value.
    };

(*
    This sample is not yet compilable.
    Don't try to compile it, you'll get many errors.
*)

✴️ Special thanks to

People from many Discord servers helping me when I need help. Links to them will be put down below.

• NaN - Not a Name : a francophone programming related Discord server, very nice and helpful:
  
• The Programmer's Hangout : a nice community about programming with many developers from all around the world:
  
• Atelier - Création d'un langage de programmation : a francophone Discord server about the creation of programming languages, with some languages creator such as me.
  
• Some other servers where people helped me mentally by being here for me whenever I needed some comfort.
• My friends who put some hope in my project.
• All the people who starred this repository so far. It's really pleasant.

💽 Pieces of software used with their licenses

• ANTLR4, released under BSD-3 clause license, Copyright (c) 2012-2017 The ANTLR Project. All rights reserved
• termcolor, released under BSD license, Copyright (c) 2013 Ihor Kalnytskyi
• LLVM, released under Open Source license, Copyright (c) 2003-2018 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All rights reserved.
• Tiny Process Library, released under the MIT License, Copyright (c) 2015-2018 Ole Christian Eidheim
• Argh ! released under the BSD-3 License, Copyright (c) 2016 Adi Shavit