Aeon

NOTE: Aeon is still a work in progress and in the very early stages. For example, there's no website just yet, the compiler is in the super early stages, etc.

Aeon is a gradually typed, interpreted programming language that combines the flexibility of a dynamic language with the safety of a static language. Aeon also combines elements from object oriented languages (e.g. classes and traits) with elements from functional programming languages (e.g. immutability by default).

Aeon allows writing of concurrent programs without having to worry about locking or data races. Furthermore Aeon comes with a high performance garbage collector based on Immix.

Aeon borrows a lot of elements from other programming languages such as Ruby, Smalltalk, Erlang/Elixir, and Python. Whitespace is used for indentation as it leads to a good combination of compact and readable code. Aeon does not feature any special statements such as if or switch, instead almost everything is implemented using methods (safe for a few keywords such as class).

Examples

The venerable Hello World:

import std::stdout

stdout.write('Hello, world!')

Concurrent Hello World:

import std::stdout
import std::process

process.spawn:
  stdout.write('Hello from process 1!')

process.spawn:
  stdout.write('Hello from process 2!')

Sending messages between processes:

import std::stdout
import std::process

let writer = process.spawn:
  let message = process.receive

let sender = process.spawn:
  let pid = process.receive

  pid.send('Hello process!')

sender.send(writer)

For more examples see the Aeon website.

Requirements

A UNIX system, Windows is currently not tested/supported

When working on Aeon itself you'll also need:

Rust 1.10 or newer using a nightly build (stable Rust is not supported)
Cargo

The following dependencies are optional but recommended:

Make
Rustup

Installation (for developers)

The easiest way to install Aeon in case you want to hack on it is to first clone the repository. Once cloned you'll need to build the VM and the compiler.

Building The VM

To build the VM run the following:

cd vm
make

This will install any required dependencies and build a debug build of the VM. By default this assumes you have rustup installed and a nightly toolchain installed. If this is not the case you can change things around by setting CARGO_CMD to whatever command should be used to run cargo. For example:

cd vm
CARGO_CMD='rustup run something-other-than-nightly cargo'

Building The Compiler

TODO: write this once the Aeon based compiler is up and running.