Proto (for prototype and primitive) is a single-file programming language that I will be using as I play with different parts of a compiler and programming languages concepts.

This repo contains the reference implementation using an interpreter. As things progress, I will create different backends using bytecode, a JIT compiler (that can either ouput bytecode or assembly code), and of course just generate assembly for a particular machine.

That's the general plan thus far but initially, with the interpreter, the goal is to first gain a better understanding of the choices existing programming languages have made, why those choices were made, and compare them.

Here is a program that calculates the n-th Fibonnaci number.

fib : function(n: const int) -> int {
    t1:     int = 1
    t2:     int = 0
    result: int = 0

    for (i: int = 0; i < n; i += 1) {
        t2      = result
        result  = t1
        t1      = t1 + t2
    }

    return result
}

main : function() -> int {
    println(fib(92))
    return 0
}

Make sure bazel is installed. Instructions can be found at https://bazel.build/install/bazelisk.

All tests are under the tests folder. Each subfolder contains tests for a particular module of the interpreter.

To run all tests:

bazel test --test_output=all //tests/...

To run tests for a specific module of the interpreter, e.g. the parser:

bazel test --test_output=all //tests/parser:parser_test

To generate the main binary for the interpreter:

bazel build //src:main

Note for Windows: after installing Bazel, remember to change the options in .bazelrc to use Windows syntax of forward slashes and colons to pass options to the compiler.

In the file fibonnaci.pro, there is a sample program that calculates the n-th Fibonacci number.

It exercises almost all of the parts of the language already implemented.

To run the interpreter:

bazel-bin/sr/main program.pro

Where program.pro is the file containing your Proto code. Or in this case replace program.pro with fibonnaci.pro.