The Basil Programming Language

println "Welcome to Basil!"

def greetings = ["Hello" "Nice to meet you" "Salutations"]

def greet name? greeting? =
    println greeting + ", " + name + "!"

println "What's your name?"
greet (read String) greetings[1]

_{For more examples, see the example/ directory located in this project's root!}

Basil is a fast and flexible language for expressing complex problems in natural terms without compromising readability, simplicity, or performance.

*Featuring...**

A novel context-sensitive parser that allows seamless manipulation of language syntax.
Homoiconicity, supporting Lisp-style metaprogramming via quotations and eval.
A "first-class everything" approach - Basil has no keywords, and almost no rigid syntax, so even primitive types and operations can be extended and manipulated.
A static, structural type system that permits expressive type-level programming.
Evaluation is compile-time by default, with the compiler capable of evaluating arbitrary Basil code.
Partial evaluation allows the compiler to "lower" expensive or effectful code, compiling it to efficient native code instead of evaluating it ahead-of-time.
Our home-grown compiler backend compiles Basil code quickly, and applies competitive optimizations.
Finally, the whole compiler and runtime fits in under a megabyte and depends only on libc.

_{*Note: Basil is highly WIP! The language is unstable, and these claims may or may not apply on all platforms or for all applications.}

Installation

Currently, we only support building the Basil compiler from source. You'll need a C++17-conformant C++ compiler, a Python 2.7 or Python 3 interpreter, and maybe a bit of resourcefulness...

$ git clone https://github.com/basilTeam/basil
$ ./build.py --help             # lists all build options (compiler to use, additional flags, etc)
$ ./build.py basil-release
$ bin/basil help

Basil's language runtime can be compiled separately, as either a statically or dynamically linked library.

$ ./build.py librt-static       # to build a statically-linked library
$ ./build.py librt-dynamic      # to build a dynamically-linked library

Supported Platforms

Operating Systems:

[x] Linux
[x] Windows
[x] MacOS

Architectures:

[x] x86_64
[ ] AArch64
[ ] RISC-V
[ ] LLVM
[ ] WASM

License

Basil is distributed under the 3-Clause BSD License. See LICENSE for details.

basilTeam / basil