petal 🌸

Petal is a hobby programming language with a compiler transpiler (to C) written in Rust. A LLVM (or maybe Cranelift) compiler backend will be added in the future.

Roadmap

• Basic function declarations (parameters, return types)
• Signed and unsigned integer types
• Variable declarations
• Function calls (arguments)
• Basic type-checking
• Variable assignment
• Named function call arguments (myFunc(value: i32))
  • Make positional parameters the default, with ~ signifying a named parameter.
• Booleans
• Control flow (if, while)
• Equality operands (==, !=)
• Smart type inference for integers
  • For example, i64 a = 5; should compile, but it does not as 5 is always treated as an i32. It should be inferred to be an i64 (if the literal fits in the width).
• Multiple module support
  • Private module members by default (expose via public keyword)
  • Name mangling
• References
• User defined types (type CString = &u8)
• Structures
  • Member access
  • Member function declarations
  • Member function calls
• Optionals (type Optional<T> = { is_present: bool, value: T })
  • Short-hand via type modifiers, e.g. ?i32.
  • Smart casting
• Basic generics
  • Generic functions
  • Member functions of generic types (func <T> Foo<T>.bar())
  • Generic type argument inference
• Enums
  • Tagged unions?
• Arrays
• IR
• ...
• Website/playground REPL
• LLVM or Cranelift backend

Contributions

Anyone is open to making a pull request! Before you do, please ensure that the feature you are adding is documented on a GitHub issue, and has been approved by @caoimhebyrne.

I request that any code submissions are not entirely AI written. If you are going to use AI tools on this project, then:

• Ensure that you understand the code that it is producing.
• Guide the AI using your existing knowledge and ideas.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 license.