Delta Programming Language

Delta is a general-purpose programming language intended as an alternative to C++, C, and Rust. The project is currently in very early stages of development. See the (incomplete) specification document for a detailed description of the language, or the more learning-oriented (and equally incomplete) Delta Book.

You can try out the language online at the Delta Sandbox.

Building from source

Clone the repository including its submodules:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/delta-lang/delta.git

Building Delta from source requires the following dependencies: a C++11 compiler, CMake, libedit, and the LLVM and Clang libraries (version 5.0.0). To run the test suite, you also need lit, which you can get with pip install lit.

I recommend using Ninja instead of Make, because it has cleaner output, and runs builds in parallel by default. It can be installed with sudo apt install ninja-build (Ubuntu) or brew install ninja (macOS).

If you're on Ubuntu you can run the provided setup-build-ubuntu.sh script to automatically download all the dependencies and invoke the appropriate commands to generate a ready-to-use build system.

Otherwise, install the dependencies manually and do the following in the root directory of the repository:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G Ninja ..

After this, the following commands can be invoked from the build directory:

ninja builds the project.
ninja check runs the test suite and reports errors in case of failure. Note: if your checks fail, try export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/
ninja coverage generates a test coverage report under coverage/.

Documentation

Auto-generated API documentation for the compiler is available at https://delta-lang.github.io/delta/doc.

To generate HTML for the API documentation locally, run doxygen docs/doxyfile in the project root directory. The output is generated under docs/html and can be viewed by opening docs/html/index.html in a browser.

Usage

The basic usage of the Delta compiler is as follows:

delta <files> compiles and links the given Delta source files into an executable.
delta -c <files> compiles the given Delta source files into an object (.o) file.

Run delta -help for more options.

Contributing

Delta is an open-source language. Contributions are welcome and encouraged! See the current projects for things that need to be done. All contributors are expected to follow the Delta code of conduct.

License