The peon programming language

Peon is a simple, functional, async-first programming language with a focus on correctness and speed.

Go to the Manual

Project structure

• src/ -> Contains the entirety of peon's toolchain
  • src/memory/ -> Contains peon's memory allocator and GC (TODO)
  • src/frontend/ -> Contains the tokenizer, parser and compiler
    • src/frontend/meta/ -> Contains shared error definitions, AST node and token declarations as well as the bytecode used by the compiler
  • src/backend/ -> Contains the peon VM and type system
  • src/util/ -> Contains utilities such as the bytecode debugger and serializer as well as procedures to handle multi-byte sequences
  • src/config.nim -> Contains compile-time configuration variables
  • src/main.nim -> Ties up the whole toolchain together by tokenizing, parsing, compiling, debugging, (de-)serializing and executing peon code
• docs/ -> Contains documentation for various components of peon (bytecode, syntax, etc.)
• tests/ -> Contains tests (both in peon and Nim) for the toolchain

Credits

• Araq, for creating the amazing language that is Nim
• The Nim community and contributors, for making Nim what it is today
• Bob Nystrom, for his amazing book that inspired me and taught me how to actually make a programming language
• Njsmith, for his awesome articles on structured concurrency

Project State

Disclaimer: The project is still in its very early days: lots of stuff is not implemented, a work in progress or otherwise outright broken. Feel free to report bugs!

Also, yes: peon is yet another programming language inspired by Bob's book, but it is also very different from Lox, which is an object-oriented, dynamically typed and very high level programming language, whereas peon is a statically-typed, functional language which aims to allow low-level interfacing with C and Nim code while being a breeze to use.

Also, peon will feature structured concurrency with coroutines (think Futures/Fibers but without callback hell). Since, unlike Lox, peon isn't a toy language, there's obviously plans to implement creature comforts like an import system, exception handling, a package manager, etc.

TODO List

In no particular order, here's a list of stuff that's done/to do (might be incomplete/out of date):

Toolchain:

• Tokenizer (with dynamic symbol table)
• Parser (with support for custom operators, even builtins)
• Compiler -> Being written
• VM -> Being written
• Bytecode (de-)serializer
• Static code debugger
• Runtime debugger/inspection tool

Type system:

• Custom types
• Intrinsics
• Generics -> WIP
• Functions

Misc:

• Pragmas -> WIP (Some pragmas implemented)
• Attribute resolution
• method-like call syntax without actual methods (dispatched at compile-time)
• ... More?

The name

The name for peon comes from my and Productive2's genius and is a result of shortening the name of the fastest animal on earth: the Peregrine Falcon. I guess I wanted this to mean peon will be blazing fast