peon/README.md

peon

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

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

Disclaimer about the project's state

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.

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 package manager, etc.