Kantan (簡単)

This compiler is deprecated in favor of the self-hosted one.

I'm only working on the self-hosted Kantan compiler, therefore this repository will probably not receive a lot of further updates.

Elevator pitch

Kantan is a system programming language with the goal of being a modernized version of C. The language is primarily designed for C programmers who want the advancements in programming language design of the last few decades in their language.

However unlike other modern system programming languages, Kantan has a relatively C like approach to issues like memory management and types.

Memory management works like in C, but if you want to, you can also use the "new" and "delete" keywords, which are just a thin wrapper around malloc and free (no vtables i promise). Currently there are only structs, but a interface system similar to Rusts traits is planned.

Getting started

To compile the Kantan compiler you need to have the development version of LLVM-7 installed. After installing LLVM just clone the repo and run cargo build --release.
Run target/release/kantan --help to get the help dialog

There currently is no way to link the resulting object files into an executable directly.
You can just run kantan <your-file>.kan; gcc out.o -o out; rm out.o to get an executable.

Syntax

Just a few examples. The test suite in tests/files contains way more examples.

Hello World

import "io"

def main(): void {
    io.printf("Hello world\n");
}

Variables

def main(): i32 {
    let i = 42; // Type inference
    let ptr = &i;
    let a = *ptr + 5;
    return a; // 47
}

Structs

import "io"

type Person struct {
    name: string,
    age: i32,
    address: Address
}

type Address struct {
    city: string,
    hnr: string // number of the house
}

def make_person(name: string, city: string, age: i32): Person {
    return Person { 
        name: name, 
        age: age, 
        address: Address { city: city, hnr: "100" } 
    };
}

def main(): void {
    let fmt = "%s, lives in %s in house number %s\n";
    let p = make_person("Peter", "Berlin", 20);
    // copy
    let hans = p;
    hans.address.city = "Neuss";
    hans.address.hnr = "200";
    hans.name = "Hans";
    io.printf(fmt, p.name, p.address.city, p.address.hnr);
    io.printf(fmt, hans.name, hans.address.city, hans.address.hnr);
}