marcelgarus / martinaise

A small, statically typed, low-level programming language.

Martinaise

A small, statically typed, low-level language.

For a quick tour of the language, have a look at the tour.mar file. To get a feeling for how Martinaise programs look, take a look at the files in the advent folder. To get an in-depth understanding of Martinaise, take a look at the standard library and the compiler, both of which are in the compiler folder.

Important

Martinaise is just a small recreational project to get familiar with monomorphization and Zig. Martinaise is not optimized for use, but for fun during implementation. Martinaise is not meant for serious projects.

Some consequences: Martinaise has no error-resilient parser (it gives up at the first error), does not support multiple files, only works on x86_64, etc.

Why?

• I've never written a low-level, statically-typed language. Doing so enables features such as monomorphization and overloading, which I find interesting to implement. This project scratches that itch.
• I've only written small projects in Zig. With this project, I try to get more familiar with Zig.

Usage

Martinaise is self-hosting – the compiler is written in Martinaise itself. So, you first need to bootstrap Martinaise.

1. In the command line, navigate to the project root (the folder where this README is).
2. Option A: Install Zig.
   Option B (TODO: support this): Run make skip-zig. The first compiler written in Martinaise was compiled into C and is included in this repo. This command compiles this (generated, unreadable) C code instead of compiling all the way from the original compiler written in Zig.
3. Run make. This builds all compiler generations. The newest compiler will be placed into the project root as the martinaise executable.
4. Run ./martinaise help for help and go from there.
   Martinaise programs can be compiled and run using ./martinaise compile tour.mar && ./tour

Editor

Important

The editor is still a work in progress.

There's an editor for Martinaise written in Martinaise. Run ./martinaise compile editor.mar to get the editor. Then run ./editor some-file.mar to edit a file. Special thanks to @antoniusnaumann for the color theme.

Language History

The language evolved substantially while writing the first Martinaise compiler in Zig. All other compilers are written in Martinaise itself.

Each compiler can be compiled using the previous compiler. Each compiler/<version> folder contains a compiler and the standard library that this compiler can compile.

For example, compiler 1 uses the compiler 0 stdlib and can be compiled using compiler 0. It's designed to compile the compiler 1 stdlib.

• 0: The first compiler, written in Zig.
• 1: A compiler written in Martinaise.
  • makes orelse customizable (not just work on Maybe)
  • ints support radixes such as 8#666:U32
  • fixes inner variables replacing ones in outer scopes
  • ensure all struct fields are set during creation
  • support global variables
  • allow omitting types
  • introduces Str, Char, OsStr
  • char literals use # instead of '
  • string literals support interpolation, including metaness
• 2: Another compiler written in Martinaise.
  • uses all the new features, making it more concise
  • produces the exact same C output as compiler 1
  • adds buffered stdout stream for writing the C output faster
  • can compile itself
• 3: Another compiler written in Martinaise.
  • Replace the C backend with an x86_64 assembly backend.
  • Add opaque types and asm functions.
  • The integer types and their operations are no longer built-into the language, but implemented as opaque types.
  • Add support for operators.
• 4: Another compiler written in Martinaise.
  • Support FASM as well as NASM.