Warning

Work in progress ! There's no "official" release yet.

Important

To get the compiler latest version for Windows, go to the release page.

Swag is a native and/or interpreted system programming language made for fun because, let's be honest, C++ is now an horrible beast ! This is my third compiler (the other ones were developed for two game engines), but this one is by far the most advanced.

You can visit the official Website or the YouTube channel. If you want to take a first look at the language, this is here.

Note that a simple visual studio code extension exists for syntax coloration.

Swag is...

• Currently in development (since 2019), and very very far to be mature. Bugs, unexpected changes, silly decisions, do not use it to send a rocket on the moon ! It's a toy.
• Low level (i'm a C++ guy for 20+ years so i had no choice). No garbage collection like in C#, Go or D, no automatic pointer management like in Swift, no ownership like in Rust.
• Statically typed (what else), but lots of automatic type detection if you want.
• Inspired by a lot of things around there, like Swift for the syntax, Jai (Jonathan Blow) for the great ideas, Go for its simplicity, C# for .NET, Zig (Andrew Kelley) for the error system, Rust for the impl thing, and so on.
• Only for Windows 10/11 and x86_64 so far, because this is already a crazy amount of work.

Swag is not...

• Object oriented, because you know what, i'm not sure this was such a good idea, after all... But with interface, a powerful using and with UFCS (uniform function call syntax), you can have a feeling of object oriented programming without inheritance or encapsulation.
• Safe at all cost. I want to be the one to make my program safe. I want to be the one to deal with memory. But Swag can help...
• 32 bits. Only 64 bits is supported.

Swag has...

• A nice and clean syntax (i know this is subjective). The goal is to reduce friction as much as possible. Programming should be fun.
• Type reflection at compile-time and runtime.
• Full compile-time execution (your whole program can be executed by the compiler without any constraint). So Swag can also act like a scripting language.
• Meta programming (you can write code that writes code).
• Interfaces for dynamic dispatch, inspired by Go.
• Modules, compiled as separate dynamic libraries.
• Very fast compile time with the custom x64 backend. When all files are in the Windows cache (hot run), and in the fast-compile configuration, it takes around 220ms on my Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 14IRH8 laptop to build and run the full test suite. It takes around 370ms to build the full standard workspace (core, ogl, audio, pixel and gui libraries).
• Fast interpretation in script mode. Seems faster than Python or Lua for example (without JIT).
• Simple error system, inspired by Zig, and in fact also by Swift.
• Generics, for a simple usage. No template nightmare here...
• Powerful macro/mixin system, without the need of a specific syntax, inspired by Jai.
• Unordered global declarations, which means that the order of global declarations does not matter (they can be in any files and in whatever order).

Swag does not have...

• Exceptions, because i don't like them.
• Header files, but who does, nowadays ?
• Mandatory semicolons, yeah...
• Tagged unions, bitfields, inline assembly..., but who knows...

Example

Here is a screen capture software fully written in Swag with the help of the Swag standard modules (core, pixel, gui...). It could be compiled as a native executable (fast) or just interpreted as a script (less... fast).

Tip

The code is there.

You can also find a bunch of Advent of Code solutions written in Swag here.

For the braves

• Start your first project, compile it, run it.
• Use the compiler as a script interpreter.
• Contribute to the compiler test suite, this will help (a lot).

For the very braves

• How to build the compiler with the full source tree.