Kipper Roadmap to v1.0 🦊🚧

[Luna-Klatzer]

Kipper Roadmap (v0.8-v1.0) 🦊🚧✨

This is the official Kipper roadmap, which shows the planned features and future releases for the Kipper project. Note that changes may occur and implementation details for the project might change over time.

List of all tracked versions (v0.8 marks the release of the first Turing-complete and C-like base structure with compiler support and code generation)

• ✔️ v0.8 - Released
• ✔️ v0.9 - Released
• ✔️ v0.10 - Released
• ✔️ v0.11 - Released
• ✔️ v0.12 - In Work
• 🚧 v0.13 - In Work
• 📝 v0.14 - Planned
• 📝 v1.0 - Planned

✔️ v0.8

Features (Released on the 2022-06-07)

• Implementation of target-specific reserved identifiers that may not be overwritten. For example, in TypeScript, all types must be reserved to avoid conflicts in the compiled code.
• Updated behaviour for built-in code generation, which allows target-specific translation for specific functionality (for example print).
• [Bug] Internal Kipper identifiers and target-specific reserved identifiers/keywords can be overwritten by user definitions #153
• [Feature] Implement optimisation tree-shaking for internal and built-in functions #159
• [Feature] Implement type conversion for primitive types #133
• [Feature] Implement boolean constants true and false #134

✔️ v0.9

Features (Released on the 2022-06-26)

• [Feature] Implement syntax and support for multiple expressions in a single expression statement #173
• [Feature] Implement if-statements (Selection statements) #182
• Implementation of operator modified expressions (!, + or -)
• Implementation of equality expressions == (equal) and != (not equal).
• Implementation of relational expressions >= (greater or equal to), > (greater than), < (less than) and <= (less or equal to).
• Implementation of logical expressions && (and) and || (or).
• [Feature] Implement tangled primary expressions #203
• [Feature] Add support for binary, hex and octal number representation #184
• [Feature] Implement semantic analysis warnings using CompilableASTNode.checkForWarnings() #199

✔️ v0.10

Features (Released on the 2023-02-19)

• [Feature] Implement error recovery for the Kipper compiler #198
• [Feature] Implement functions definitions, declarations and call expressions for user-defined functions #183
• [Feature] Add new package @kipper/web #86
• [Feature] Implement new translation target for JavaScript #208
• [Feature] Implement for loop statements #270
• [Feature] Implement while loop statements #268
• [Feature] Implement control-flow statements continue and break for Kipper loop statements #269
• [Feature] Implement built-in function len() to get the length of a string #411
• [Feature] Implement array-access syntax IDENTIFIER[INDEX] for strings #372
• [Feature] Add special compile-time constant variable __name__ returning the name of the compiled file #412
• [Feature] Implement warnings for useless statements (statements without assignment or value modification) #413
• [Feature] Implement unary and postfix operators ++ and -- #272
• [Feature] Implement arithmetic assignment operators +=, -=, *=, %= and /= #273
• [Feature] Implement support for single-line comments using // #400

✔️ v0.11

Features (Released on the 2024-07-11)

• [Feature] Implement support for f-string expressions #287
• [Feature] Add config file support for @kipper/cli  #508
• [Feature] Implement do ... while loop statement #271
• [Other] Remove useless command analyse and replace it with compile --dry-run #532
• [Feature] Implement bitwise operators <<, >>, >>>, ~, ^, | and & #493
• [Feature] Add ternary conditional operator #534
• [Feature] Add support for string multiplication (str * num) #478
• [Feature] Add support for compiler-behaviour-modifying pragma comments #480
• [Feature] Implement syntax for objects literals (object definition) #523
• [Feature] Add lambda function expressions #572
• [Other] Deprecate and remove --abort-on-first-error in favor of --no-recover as maintainence for the flag is not worth it #501

✔️ v0.12

Features (Released on the 2024-09-25)

• [Feature] Implement internal representation for objects and object types (interfaces) #524
• [Feature] Implement dot notation member-access syntax parent.field #67
• [Feature] Implement syntax for interface type generation #525
• [Feature] Implement basic generic type system for built-in types #494
• [Feature] Add full object support and translation for JS/TS targets #526
• [Feature] Implement Array<T> type and constant array initialisation expression syntax #499
• [Feature] Add support for arrays to len() #667
• [Feature] Implement assignment to arrays based on index #669
• [Feature] Implement Func<P..., T> generic function type and auto function type inference #584
• [Feature] Implement function calls from function references (variable-bound functions) #674
• [Feature] Add full interface support for defining interfaces and checking against given types #527
• [Feature] Implement built-in Kipper types objects #369
• [Feature] Implement support for built-in type identifiers such as str, num, bool etc. #495
• [Feature] Implement any type which allows any value to be passed to it, but not the other way around #670
• [Feature] Implement high-level typeof operator #663
• [Feature] Add runtime type generation for builtin types #659
• [Feature] Add built-in constant NaN #671
• [Feature] Implement new to be able to instantiate objects #679
• [Feature] Implement this keyword for accessing class-scoped variables #697
• [Feature] instanceof operator for checking whether an object is an instance of a class #686
• [Feature] Implement match operator for matching any type to a type #672

🚧 v0.13

• [Feature] Implement cast as, try as and force as #685
• [Feature] Implement recursive self-referencing functions #729
• [Feature] Add exception class Error #664
• [Feature] Implement try/catch statement to handle exceptions #654
• [Feature] Implement throw keyword to raise errors inside any code block  #687
• [Feature] Implement spread operator for objects and arrays allowing the direct insertion of another object or array #668
• [Feature] Implement branch-specific type narrowing given type check conditions (implicit type casting) #705
• [Feature] Implement in expression which checks if a given key exists in the provided type #707
• [Feature] Implement basic Async Function API #727
• [Feature] Implement stack context-aware compiler inspection and dynamic type narrowing #728
• [Feature] Implement high-level function fetch() building on top of the standard fetch API #725

🚧 v0.14

• [Feature] Implement type unions T1 | T2 | T3 ... Tn #496
• [Feature] Implement type joining T1 & T2 & T3 ... Tn #706

🚀📝 Future plans (Unknown Release)

• Adding support for file imports using either compiled CommonJS or ESM modules. Inside Kipper, the standard ES syntax should be used to import files.
• [Feature] Implement pipeline operator |> #107
• [Feature] Add compiler package support for Deno #385
• Import support for TypeScript files, i.e. importing files and wrapping them for the Kipper context.
• Import support for JavaScript files, i.e. importing files and wrapping them for the Kipper context.
• Strict cast requirements for using raw JavaScript import variables, classes or functions.
• .d.ts Type Definition file support for resolving TypeScript types and importing types into a Kipper program/namespace.
• node_modules resolution and module support to allow for importing files in dependencies. This should work with any node package installer and simply resolve the dependencies.
• [Feature] Use the Rust SWC Compiler to support older versions of JavaScript and TypeScript, and allow for faster compilations #257 (Only Option 1. - Rust implementations for TS and JS may come later. Detailed comment here)

[Luna-Klatzer]

Project structure plan as done during the associated college course:

• Projektstrukturplan.png (German Edition + Live presentation)

• Project-structure-plan.png (English Edition)

This shows the concrete plan for Kipper v1.0 and the expectations for its capabilities.