README.md

Titan

Titan is a new programming language, designed to be a statically-typed, ahead-of-time compiled sister language to Lua. It is an application programming language with a focus on performance.

This repository contains the initial prototype of the Titan compiler. It compiles a single Titan module to C code in the artisanal style. The syntax is a subset of Lua syntax, plus types, and is specified in titan-v0.ebnf.

Install

First you need to build and install the Lua interpreter in the lua folder, as it has the needed changes to luaconf.h to be able to load Titan modules. Apart from the changes in luaconf.h this interpreter is identical to Lua 5.3.4. The package.cpath of this interpreter has a /usr/local/lib/titan/0.5/?.so entry for any system-wide Titan modules.

You can install the Titan compiler itself using LuaRocks this will also install all dependencies automatically.

    $ [install luarocks]
    $ luarocks install titan-scm-1.rockspec

Requirements for running the compiler

1. LPegLabel >= 1.0.0, < 1.5.0
2. inspect >= 3.1.0
3. argparse >= 0.5.0
4. luafilesystem >= 1.7.0

Usage

    $ titanc [--print-ast] [--lua <path>] [--tree <path>] <module> [<module>]

The compiler takes a list of module names that you want to compile. Modules are looked up in the source tree (defaults to the current working directory, but you can override this with the --tree option), as well as in the Titan binary path, a semicolon-separated list of paths (defaults to .;/usr/local/lib/titan/0.5, you can override with a TITAN_PATH_0_5 or TITAN_PATH environment variable). A module gets compiled if its .titan file is newer than its binary, or a binary does not exist.

If everything is all right with your modules this will generate shared libraries (in the same path as the module source) that you can require from Lua, and call any exported functions/access exported variables.

Running the test suite

The test suite es written using Busted, which can be installed using LuaRocks:

    $ luarocks install busted

Then, you need to bulid the local copy of Lua, and run busted from the root directory of this repository:

    $ cd lua
    $ make linux
    $ cd ..
    $ busted

You may need to adapt the invocation of make above to your platform.

Running the benchmarks suite

Running all benchmarks in benchmarks directory:

$ ./run_benchmarks.lua

Running a single benchmark:

$ ./run_benchmarks.lua benchmarks/<benchmark_name>

Compiler options

    --print-ast                     Print the AST.
    --lua <path>                    Path to the Lua sources (default 'lua/src')
    --tree <path>                   Path to the source tree for your Titan modules (default '.')
    -h, --help                      Show this help message and exit.

Tentative roadmap

This is a very preliminary roadmap towards Titan 1.0, where everything is subject to change, with things more likely to change the further they are in the roadmap:

Supported

• control structures
• integers
• floats
• booleans
• strings
• arrays
• top-level functions
• early-bound modules

In progress

• records (structs)
• first-class functions (still only in the top-level)

Next

• maps
• basic FFI with C (C arrays, C structs, C pointers, call C functions that take numbers and pointers as arguments)
• standard library that is a subset of Lua's standard library, built using the C FFI
• tagged variants (unions of structs with some syntax for switch/case on the tag)
• multiple assignment/multiple returns
• polymorphic functions
• for-in
• self-hosted compiler
• nested and anonymous first-class functions with proper lexical scoping (closures)
• ":" syntax sugar for records of functions
• classes with single inheritance, either Go/Java/C#/Swift-like interfaces/protocols or Haskell/Rust-like typeclasses/traits
• ":" method calls (not syntax sugar)
• operator overloading
• ...Titan 1.0!