Nit is an expressive language with a script-like syntax, a friendly type-system and aims at elegance, simplicity and intuitiveness.

Nit has a simple straightforward style and can usually be picked up quickly, particularly by anyone who has programmed before. While object-oriented, it allows procedural styles.

The Nit Compiler (nitc) produces efficient machine language binaries.

Some Nit features:

• Pure Object-Oriented.
• Multiple Inheritance.
• Realist typing policy.
• Light and clear syntax.

Requirements:

• gcc http://gcc.gnu.org/ (or a compatible C compiler)
• pkg-config http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config/
• ccache http://ccache.samba.org/ to improve recompilation
• libgc-dev http://hboehm.info/gc/
• graphviz http://www.graphviz.org/ to enable graphs with the nitdoc tool
• libunwind http://nongnu.org/libunwind

Those are available in most Linux distributions

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential ccache libgc-dev graphviz libunwind-dev pkg-config

and on OS X using brew

$ brew install ccache bdw-gc graphviz libunwind-headers pkgconfig

or with MacPorts

$ sudo port install ccache boehmgc graphviz libunwind-headers pkgconfig

Important files and directories:

• benchmarks/ Script to bench the compilers
• bin/ The Nit tools
• c_src/ C code of nitc (needed to bootstrap)
• clib/ C code needed by nitc to compile programs
• contrib/ Various Nit programs (may or may not be useful)
• doc/ Documentation
• examples/ Program examples written in Nit
• lib/ Nit standard library
• LICENCE License of the software
• Makefile Bootstrap the Nit tools
• misc/ Some additional files for commons text editors and tools
• NOTICE.md List of the authors
• README This file
• share/ Common resources used by tools
• src/ The Nit tool sources (written in Nit)
• tests/ Non-regression test-suite

How to start:

$ make
$ bin/nitc examples/hello_world.nit
$ ./hello_world

You can source misc/nit_env.sh to setup your environment like PATH, MANPATH and bash completion. To have your environment automatically configured at login, just source it with install as argument.

$ . misc/nit_env.sh install

Contributing:

To contribute to Nit, please see CONTRIBUTING.

The best way to ask the team for advice, submit bugs or request features, is through the use of Github issues, using the appropriate tag (forum, feature-request, bug).

Information, contacts and help:

• Website http://www.nitlanguage.org
• Issues https://github.com/nitlang/nit/issues
• Chatroom https://gitter.im/nitlang/nit