Welcome to NexLang

Table of Contents

• About
• Examples
  • Example Hello World
  • Example Print Max
  • More Examples
• Getting Started
  • Install & Build
  • User Guide

About

NexLang is a custom systems programming language focused on providing strong control over the low level fundamentals of your program while bringing a modern syntax and robust type checking. Currently, this compiler targets the MIPS assembly language instruction set and uses an emulator to run programs and unit tests. Additional architectures should be relatively straight forward to port over to and RISC-V support is currently in the works.

NexLang Documentation:

• NexLang Reference
• NexLang Library

Examples

Example Hello World

mod main;

import print;

fn main(x: i32, y: i32) -> i32 {
  println("Hello World!");
  return 0;
}

Example Print Max

mod main;

import print;
import math;

fn main(x: i32, y: i32) -> i32 {
  // type is inferred
  let z = max(x, y);
  // type can also be explicitly defined
  let w: i32 = z;
  println(z);
  return 0;
}

More Examples

Additional examples can be found within the examples directory.

Getting Started

Install & Build

• Ensure you have cmake, rust and C++20 installed
  • To verify rust was installed correctly, run rustc --version
  • To verify cmake was installed correctly, run cmake --version
• Clone the repo and cd into the project directory
• Then run the following command(s)

mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make -j8

• To verify everything is working correctly, run ./tests/tests to run the unit tests

User Guide

Within the build directly, you will find an executable named cnl. To compile your first program, simply run the executable and provide the filepath as an argument.

./cnl main.nl

You can also optionally specify an output path using the -o flag.

./cnl main.nl -o main.bin

The built binary can be run by using the provided emulator located in the build directory. In addition to providing a path to the compiled binary, you must also provide two integers which are supplied to the main function of the program.

./emulate main.bin 3 5