KerLang is an innovative programming language built with love by Arthur Correnson and Anima Libera for the first edition of Lang Jam. It features a state of the art compiler named "The Glorious KerLang Compiler" (also known as the Glorious Ker-Lann Compiler but who cares ?) and a first-class support for comment-oriented programming.
Writing good comments is CS 101. But we all know how hard it is to stay focus on writing comments and documentation. Comment-oriented programming propose a game changing approach to software development : instead of writing the code and then writing comments, KerLang enforce you to over-comment your code and the compiler generate the code for you !
Here is an example program :
/*
This function takes 1 argument,
it returns the product of argument 1 and 2.
*/
function twice;When executing a program written in KerLang, you first ask the compiler to generate code. The KerLang compiler is capable of producing code for the following languages:
- Python3
- C
- OCaml
To generate code, one can simply specify an output file. The KerLang compiler will automatically decide which language to target based on the file extension. For example the command gklc twice.kl -o twice.ml will generate the following ocaml file :
(*----------------------------------------------------*)
(* This code is generated by the KerLang compiler and *)
(* is not intended to be manually edited *)
(*----------------------------------------------------*)
let twice = (fun x0 ->
(( * )
x0
2))If you don't want to generate source code it is possible to execute it directly too ! To do so you just need to provide a main function in your sources, the execution of the main function can be requested using the -x option of the compiler.
Here is an example using a main function :
/*
This function takes 1 argument,
it returns the product of argument 1 and 2.
*/
function twice;
/*
It uses 8.
It shows the application of twice on 3.
*/
function main;If compiled into C, Ocaml or Python3, such program will call the main function automatically.
To know more about KerLang, examples are ready to be run in the examples/ folder. The KerLang manual is also available as a pdf file.
KerLang is crafted in pure OCaml (version 4.11.1) with no dependencies other than dune as its build system.
To install a suitable version of OCaml from scratch, the following commands should do the job on any OS
bash -c "sh <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ocaml/opam/master/shell/install.sh)"
opam init
eval $(opam env)
opam switch create 4.11.1
opam install dune
Compiling the Glorious KerLang Compiler is as simple as typing make at the project's root !
KerLang is shipped with an experimental web IDE. After building the project, one can simply launch the IDE by opening the file web/app.html in any web browser.
