A modern programming language focusing on a strong type system and modern syntax
Zirco is an unstable work-in-progress compiled programming language with the goal of having an extremely strong runtime type system with a focus on the ability to easily represent states of a program.
It started out as (and still is) a hobby project for me to learn more about the world of compiler development, so there are no real promises for Zirco's real production usability. However, it also serves as a well-implemented reference for designing a compiler.
As of now, Zirco uses a C-like set of semantics with Rusty syntax.
This repository contains the entire Zirco compiler and all of its development work, including language-related proposals.
To function, Zirco has a few prerequisite programs that must be available. We recommend using Zirco on a Linux or WSL system, but it should work on Windows.
- a copy of
zrc's source code
Git is the primary tool used for development of Zirco, so the preferred method of obtaining this is by using Git and cloning our repository. There are alternative methods, but these are not listed as they make updating much more difficult. - an up-to-date stable Rust toolchain
Zirco is implemented in Rust, so an up-to-date version ofrustcandcargois required. These can be obtained withrustup, which you can install here. - the LLVM static or dynamic library
Zirco's code generator (zrc_codegen) relies on LLVM to allow efficient and simple code generation. For this reason, you need the static or dynamic LLVM library. If you link with the static library, the dynamic library will not be needed at runtime. If you do not use the static library, all hosts running your built compiler will need the dynamic library. The installation of these libraries depends on your platform — in the future we will document this better.
If you decided to use Git to download the repository, run git clone https://github.com/zirco-lang/zrc in a command line. Then, run cd zrc to move into that directory. Otherwise, obtain a terminal within our codebase in your preferred method.
Then, to compile zrc and all of its dependencies in debug mode, simply run cargo build. You can execute the built compiler with cargo run -- ARGS. If you are wanting to produce a release build, run cargo build --release and an optimized executable will be found in target/release/zrc.
If you would like to install zrc to your Cargo $PATH, run cargo install --path compiler/zrc. This will allow you to use zrc just like other executables on your system.
If you are directly invoking the compiler with cargo, replace zrc with cargo run -- in the below commands.
You can compile a single Zirco file to a .o object with zrc --emit object -o main.o main.zr. Otherwise, zrc main.zr will emit LLVM IR. This is soon to change.
For more usage help, refer to zrc --help.
So that Zirco can continue to evolve at a rapid pace, there are NO STABILITY GUARENTEES on the current version of Zirco and zrc.
All internal compiler APIs are VERY unstable and if you integrate them with your own tooling builds may fail
if you update zrc. Zirco code may change semantics or fail to build on a different zrc version. As of now,
all internal libraries and zrc is given version 0.1.0 until we begin maintaining stability.
Contributions to Zirco are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for more information on how to contribute to the project.
Zirco is released under the GNU GPL v3.0. To contact the maintainer, please use issues or a GitHub discussion. For sensitive matters, please email [email protected] and optionally encrypt your messages using my PGP key.
If you're curious, here's our test coverage represented as a cool little chart:
