ocean

A C-like programming language (get it like sea-like like an ocean lol)

Motivation

This is a hobby language for myself so I can learn more about how compilers work and how to design programming languages.

I am really interested in static analysis and optimizations so I will be building those kinds of features into this language. Also, when I use this language I want to feel like I am in control of the language without having to modify the compiler at all. Tooling is also super important to me so I would like to build a bunch of really nice tooling.

My inspiration comes from all the programming languages I have used and all the pain points I have run into. Some languages that I really like but have weird nitpicks with are:

• Rust
• C++
• D
• C#
• Likely loads of others since I have used a bunch but I didn't consciously pull features from those.

It is unimportant what the exact nitpicks are because I don't understand any of these languages in their entirety and likely just don't know how to properly use the things I don't like.

Key Features

Tooling

I like the dotnet and cargo system and want to provide a similar all-in-one kind of experience with this compiler. Some ideas I had were:

• Testing
  • Unit
  • Fuzz
• Performance analysis
• Memory layout reader / CPU register viewer

  Simple Build Systems

  I want to be able to give the compiler the file that contains the start of the program and be able to compile it even if the codebase is spread across many files. I also would like to integrate a decent package manager and library loader into the build system so you don't have to wrestle the compiler to find your dependencies.

  Broad Compile Targets

  It would be cool if we can have this language compile to several targets such as:

• Native machine code
• LLVM
• C++
• CLR (dotnet)
• Java bytecode

Static Analysis

I would like to be able to have the compiler understand what values certain variables can be at any given point in the program so we can check for things like unhandled cases, dead code, and out-of-bounds accesses at compile time. There are many more things I would want to check for but I don't know what I don't know.

Neat Generic System

I want to have generics determined by the operators and functions that are being used on the generic variables. This would provide some pretty neat functionality I feel but I haven't gotten to that point yet to really play with it.

Generic Operator Overloading

My idea for this would involve parsing occurring in multiple steps with some type checking to figure out what functions exist and what annotations are on those functions. In that type checking pass, we can figure out what operators we are adding and at what precedence level. At this point, we can figure out if there are any issues with the declared operators. The operator's function can have generic types because we are just generating the operator precedence table based on number of arguments and info in the annotation solely. The type info comes in the last type checking pass when we have already converted those operator expression nodes into function call nodes. Then we can probably work out the macros here as well but I think that would be better done after the expression parsing pass in case there are any code replacements needed. Then the next parsing pass will parse all the expression statements in the ast from the first pass. Since we will be walking the ast, we will have both recursive operators and scoped overloaded operators.