83 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
83 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Nativity
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---
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Nativity is the language and compiler for Birth Software.
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# Design goals
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Nativity is aimed to be reliable, fast and secure. It's designed with performance in mind. A few goals:
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- Compile at millions of line per second, because hardware allows it and we must take it.
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- Have top performance out of the output machine code. For that, we want to offer the programmer as many tools as possible, including manual inline assembly, SIMD and SIMT/SPMD (ispc and shader-like code).
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- No garbage collection. If you want it, you write it! Software should be fast and some human conveniences are not worth it to the users or developers.
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- One language for everything. Forget about scripting languages, external build systems and all that nonsense.
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- Sane cross-compilation.
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- Statically-linked binaries when possible.
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- Allocation in the standard library is based on virtual memory based arenas.
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- 64-bit platform focus
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# Initial constraints
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Before self-hosting, Nativity will only be available on Linux (x86\_64) and MacOS (aarch64). The main reason for this is that these are the platforms commonly used for the lead developer, so extending the target range could be wasteful.
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Nonetheless, self-hosting is the main immediate goal of the project, so after that Windows will be supported as well. The supported target range after self-hosted will begin with aarch64 and x86\_64 as cpu architectures and Linux, MacOS and Windows as operating systems. The target range is subject to expansion.
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Before self-hosting, there will be no float or vector support. Intrinsics will only be implemented as needed. After self-hosting, an implementation of all this will follow.
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# Language draft
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## Basic types
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### Boolean
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Nativity does not support boolean types since there is no hardware concept of it. Instead, integer types should support the boolean use case.
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### Integers
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Nativity supports 1-bit to 64-bit signed and unsigned integers.
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### Float
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Nativity does not support float types just yet. Support for 32-bit and 64-bit floats will be added.
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### Vector
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Nativity does not support vector types just yet. Support will be added.
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### Hello, World!
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This is a valid hello world with libc linked
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```nat {filename="main.nat"}
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module std;
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fn [cc(.c)] main [export] () s32 {
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std.print("Hello world\n");
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return 0;
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}
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```
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## Conditionals
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```nat {filename="main.nat"}
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module std;
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fn [cc(.c)] main [export] () s32 {
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// With integers:
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>a: u32 = 1;
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if (a) {
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// 'a' is not zero
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} else {
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// 'a' is zero
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}
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// With pointers
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>pointer: ?*u32 = a.&;
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if (?a) {
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// Here the variable is shadowed, the attribute "non-null" is added to the backend to the pointer variable
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} else {
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// Here the pointer is null
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}
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}
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```
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