Argentum Programming Language

Links

• Site: aglang.org
• Playground: runs on my RaspberryPi

Main language features:

• Safety - memory-safety, type-safety, null-safety, const-safety etc.
  Unlike Rust and Swift Argetnum has no unsafe mode and doesn't need one
• Fully automated memory management with no memory leaks.
  Rust, Swift, garbage-collected languages leak memory; Argentum doesn't
• High efficiency. Argentum is about as fast as C++ and Rust
  • Argentum doesn't use GC (no pauses, no memory and CPU overheads)
  • It compiles to tiny native executables with no extra dependencies.
  • Fast interface method calls
  • Fast dynamic casts
• Simplicity
• Multithreading without deadlocks and data races
• Designed for large apps
  • Modularity
  • Versioning (TBD)
  • Built-in unit tests (TBD)
• Strict type system
• Direct interop with C.

Examples

This language is "managed", like Java but safer.
These examples compile into less than 20K Windows executables.
No virtual machine/framework needed.
Apps can work forever, no GC pauses, no leaks, no memory corruptions.

Hello world

sys_log("Hello World")

SqLite to HTML

using sys { log }
using sqliteFfi { Sqlite, xRW }
using string { htmlEscape }

Sqlite.open("mydb.sqlite", xRW) ? `db
    db.query("
        SELECT "id", "name", "avatar"
        FROM "table"
    ", 0)
    .execute `row {
        log("{}\
           <li id={row.intAt(0)}>
              <img src="ava/{row.stringAt(2)}"/>
              <div>{row.stringAt(1).htmlEscape()}</div>
           </li> 
        ")
    }

#More examples: playground, demo.

Why not X

• Java, Go, Kotlin, Java Script, Dart, C# etc.
  • using Garbage collector
  • Have unpredictable pauses
  • Have huge memory and CPU overheads
  • Create hard to detect memory leaks
  • Have heavy VMs/Runtimes/Frameworks
• Rust, Swift etc
  • Built on ref-counting
  • Have unsafe mode and force developers to use this mode by disallowing the very basic operations
  • prone to hard to detect memory leaks caused by cycles in ownership graphs
• C, C++ etc.
  • Manual memory management
  • Leaks
  • Permanent Unsafe mode.

Development

I have a working prototype of the 2nd milestone that includes:

• Stand-alone compiler producing windows and Linux execitables for X86 and ARM64
• Multithreading
• Parameterized classes and interfaces
• String interpolation
• Frozen-mutable object hierrarchies
• Fast unwind and direct breaks from nested levels of lambdas
• Standard container library
• Bindings to Curl, SqLite, SDL.

Within the next couple of months I plan to extend the language:

• Port to: Wasm, Android
• Bindings to Skia
• Standard UI library

I plan to work alone, though I'd appreciate any feedback and bugfixes in the form of pull requests.