The Co programming language

A programming language and optimizing compiler.

This is a project about:

• Designing a practical, general-purpose programming language
  • Statically typed, but the compiler does as much for you as possible
  • Simple syntax, few built-ins
  • More like Go than JavaScript
• Optimizing compiler
  • Input-language agnostic
  • Intermediate Representation in SSA form
  • Flexible target architecture (x86, amd64, vm, wasm, etc.)
• Pipelined rather than progressive
  • scanning source code into the parser
  • parser passes AST chunks to the IR builder
  • IR builder optimizes the chunks and then passes them to the code generator
  • All this happens in a streaming fashion
  • But each step can be easily separated and run independendly, making it easy to inspect the state of the compiler at various steps of the process.
• Using no exernal libraries
  • Portable (can run in a web browser)
  • Simplify codebase
  • Minimize risk of security concerns
  • Maximize startup performance

Using

Requirements: nodejs >=8.0

Building:

• Setup: npm install
• Build incrementally: ./build.js -w
• Run: ./dist/co.g

Some useful things:

• Build debug version in one go: ./build.js
• Build optimized production version: ./build.js -O
• Run unit tests before main program: ./dist/co.g -test
• Run unit tests and exit: ./dist/co.g -test-only
• Print source diagnostics report and exit: ./dist/co.g -nobuild
• Live coding setup:
  • Terminal 1: ./build.js -w
  • Terminal 2: autorun dist/co.g
  • You'll need autorun