Hadron

Hello and welcome to Hadron 👋, an early-stage language development project! We're thrilled that you've stopped by our project and hope you'll consider trying it out.

We welcome any ideas, feedback, and contributions from the community. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting out, we'd love to hear from you.

Please take a look at our documentation and feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions.

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Hadron is a custom programming language written in C++. It is designed to be a versatile language that can be transpiled (see notes) or interpreted. It aims to provide a simple and intuitive syntax, while still being powerful and flexible.

Planned Features

• Simple and intuitive syntax
• Static type system
• On-demand garbage collection
• Support for closures and anonymous functions
• First-class functions
• Modules and namespaces
• Interoperability with C code
• Transpilation to C, JavaScript, Python, and other languages

Getting Started

To build Hadron, you need to have clang installed on your system. You can build Hadron by running the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/hadron-lang/hadron.git
cd hadron
cmake -B build
cmake --build build

To run the interpreter, you can use the following commands:

./build/hadron

To compile to bytecode, you can use the following command:

./build/hadron input.hdn # compiled to `input.hbc`

Hadron will attempt to execute any .hbc file. For example:

./build/hadron input.hbc

Examples

Please note that the syntax may change in the future.

Here is an example of a "Hello, world!" program in Hadron:

fx main {
  IO:out("Hello, world!")
}

And here is an example of a function that calculates the nth Fibonacci number:

fx fib(i32 n) {
  if n < 2 { return n; }
  else { return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2); }
} i32

fx main() {
  IO:out(fib(10));
}

Roadmap

Feature	Status	Details
Basic Mathematical Expressions	✅ Complete	Supports +, -, *, /, and parentheses for grouping.
Numbers	✅ Complete	Support for different number syntaxes such as 0xFF, 0b1010, 0x.8p1 and others.
Logical and Binary Expressions	⚠️ In Progress	Support for logical operators !, &&, || and binary operators ~, &, |, and ^.
Variable Declarations	⚠️ In Progress	Syntax: i32 a = 1 + 2;.
Control Flow	❌ Not Started	if, for, while, and switch expressions.
Function Definitions	❌ Not Started	Syntax for fx name(args) {} and return types.
Number Ranges	❌ Not Started	Support for range operators .., =.., ..=, and =..=.
Standard Library Integration	❌ Not Started	Namespace IO, strings, arrays, and utilities.
Type Inference	❌ Not Started	Implicit types with x $= 42.
Asynchronous Execution	❌ Not Started	Create and execute asynchronous functions using async and await

Development Notes

In its current state, transpilation has not yet been implemented. This is due to the priority given to building and refining the interpreter, which serves as the foundation for executing the language's bytecode. Key focus areas include:

• Optimizing the Interpreter: Ensuring efficient execution of bytecode, with minimal runtime overhead.
• Defining Core Features: Establishing a robust syntax and semantics for the language, including parsing and symbol resolution.
• Bytecode Stability: Finalizing the bytecode format to maintain compatibility as the project evolves.

Future plans include adding a transpilation layer, which will allow Hadron code to be converted to other languages or directly to native assembly. This will be addressed after the interpreter achieves sufficient maturity and performance benchmarks are met. For now, the focus remains on creating a stable and feature-complete execution environment.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to Hadron! If you find a bug or have an idea for a new feature, please contact us here or open an issue on our GitHub repository. If you would like to contribute code, please submit a pull request. Before submitting a pull request, please make sure your code follows our coding style and passes our tests.

License

Hadron is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.