Basalt

This repository hosts an interpreter for the Basalt programming language. In the future, the goal is to evolve this project into an all-in-one bundle made of an interpreter, a compiler, and a debugger. Basalt is designed to be compiled directly to machine code, and offers all the features a low level language would, while still being able to be interpreted like languages like Python or Ruby (enhancing portability, and reducing wasted time by removing the need to perform a full compilation of your code-base just to run unit-tests).

Building from source

In order to build Basalt from source, conan, cmake and g++ must be installed on your machine. Assuming such tools are indeed installed on the host machine, running the following command will download dependencies, setup and start the build.

$ git clone https://www.github.com/fDero/Basalt
$ cd Basalt
$ conan install . --output-folder=dependencies --build=missing
$ cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release
$ cmake --build build --target basalt

notice: conan installations prior to the 2.8.1 version might not be able to correctly download and install the necessary dependencies for the project. Try to upgrade it before proceeding.

notice: When building on Windows, you might need to replace cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release with cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release -G "MinGW Makefiles" -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++, make sure to remove the directories build and out before running the command again.

notice: If you want to run the unit-tests, run the command cmake --build build --target basalt_unit_tests. This will create a binary called basalt_unit_tests that will perform the tests when executed. Tests are written using the gtest (googletest) unit-testing framework. Keep in mind that compilation will take much longer when compiling the test-suite, since gtest is a framework that heavily relies on the use of macros.

Hello World

To make your first hello-world program in Basalt, all it takes is to create a file with the .bt extension (in this case, it will be called hello.bt) containing the following code:

package main;

func main() {
    console::println("Hello, World!");
}

Once you have the file set up, to run it just use the basalt -r hello.bt command in console.

$ basalt -r hello.bt
Hello, World!

Types

Basalt is a strictly typed language, it has a C-style type system with Int, Float, Bool, Char, String as primitive types.

package main;

func main() {
    var x : Int = 6;
    var y : Float = 9.4;
    var f : Bool = false;
    var c : Char = 'z';
    var s : String = "hello world";
}

Recursion

Basalt supports recursion just like any other language, and a good way to show it is with the classic fibonacci example, consider the following code:

package main;

func fibo(n : Int) -> Int {
    if (n < 2) {
        return 1;
    }
    else {
        return fibo(n-1) + fibo(n-2);
    }
}

func main() {
    console::println(fibo(6));
}

assuming the file is called fibo.bt, then it can be executed just like we did earlier with the hello-world example, using the basalt -r command.

$ basalt -r fibo.bt
21