adelarsq / lightlang

General purpose FP first programming language made for peace that compiles for your desired language/platform [WIP] 💙💛🤍💚

Light Language 🖤💙💛

Light it's a language to bring light for people.

Objectives This is not a toy project. In the next years this project will be alive!

Premisses Technology and peace together. See License

About the creator I am creating this project on my free time, but with production in mind. I don't know how much time will take but we will reach there :)

Principles

• Performance and energy efficiency 1
• Minimal syntax - based on LISP
• Manutenability - avoid breaking changes
• Strongly typed
• Easy FFI

Roadmap

• Define roadmap
• Define language to write the first compiler version WIP
• Logo
• Define Language used to implement -> Go
• POC features - ~1 year
  • Define main syntax -> LISP
  • Define grammar WIP -- see Syntax.md and light.ebnf
  • Create AST implementation
  • Transpilers (something like Fable for F#) (first round):
    • Go
    • JavaScript and JSON
    • Lua
  • Implement Light in Light
  • REPL (based on Elixir's REPL)
  • Package manager (allow multiple backends? )
  • LSP
  • Treesitter
  • DAP
  • Transpilers (second round)
    • Zig
    • Swift
    • ECMAScript - for webdev
    • WebAssembly - for webdev
    • Rust/Crab
    • Java
    • Elixir
    • F#
    • V
• Long term ~2 or more years
  • Standalone compiler ~? years
    • LLVM support
• On the map
  • SIMD
  • Shaders

License

• Light License - a restricted version from the MIT License.

News

• Show HN: Light Language - General purpose programming language made for peace

Based on

These are the list of languages on which this will be based:

• Fennel
• Zig
• F# Fable
• ELM and Gren
• V
• Lua
• Lisp

Others:

• Julia
• Python
• Elixir
• Potigol
• Roc
• Carbon
• Odin
• Raku 1
• Austral
• Haskell
• Prolog
• CoffeeScript
• Hare
• Shen
• LCL
• TXR
• blisp
• lips
• lumen
• guile

lightlang's Issues

Draft: comptime support

Using comptime instead of generics, based on Zig approach.

Links:

• What is Zig comptime

Draft: Embedded UI support

This will be in a proper library, but keeping this for now.

Draft: Embedded HTTP server

This will be in a proper library, but keeping this for now.

Draft: No circular dependencies

Links:

• Cyclic dependencies are evil

Draft: Package management

Features:

• Create package for the transpiled language/platforms
• Namespace support

Logo

Design Draf: Allow to annotate code as must-not-allocate

It's an interesting idea based on the article https://notes.eatonphil.com/2024-03-15-zig-rust-and-other-languages.html :

I think the ideal situation in the future will be that every language supports annotating blocks of code as must-not-allocate or something along those lines. Either the compiler will enforce this and fail if you seem to allocate in a block marked must-not-allocate, or it will panic during runtime so you can catch this in tests.

Draft: AI optimized compiler

Related articles:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06004-9

Draft: Infix functions

Verify if infix functions will be good or not for simplicy of the language.

Reference: fsharp/fslang-suggestions#772

Draft: Prolog

Prolog support will be based on Shen approach.

Links:

• Shen Prolog
• Samples

Draft: Source generators

Source generators within the language itselt for:

• FFI pourpouses
• Syntax extensions (SQL, HTML, ...)
• Type providers? 1