About§

The goal of this project is to design a programming language and implement a compiler for it. This project started in June of 2021, and the language has evolved a lot since then. I’m waiting to have a stable language specification before writing a compiler.

The project is still in planning.

The language§

The language, called Birdway, is meant to create command-line applications by having I/O, argument parsing and TUI integrated into the language. Its main features are described below.

Functional and imperative programming§

Birdway is mainly a functional programming language, while supporting imperative programming features (loops, conditionals, …), kind of like Rust.

Immutablity by default§

All bindings are immutable by default, but mutable variables can still be declared explicitly.

A very simple type system§

Birdway has only eight primitive datatypes, a few composite ones and allows user-defined structures and enumerations.

First-class / anonymous functions§

In Birdway, functions are first-class citizens and can be declared and used anywhere like any other type.

Full type inference§

Birdway is statically and strongly typed, but doesn’t require bindings, function arguments and return values to be typed. The type of a value is determined by how it is created and used.

Other features§

• Function overloading
• Command-line arguments parsing
• CFFI

The compiler§

The compiler, called bw, will compile Birdway code down to machine code, creating small and fast standalone executables.