Bullet is a compiled, generic programming language that is optimized for hobby usage, solo developers, or small teams, in a performance-critical setting where full (i.e. manual) control over memory and threads is required. Its overarching philosophy is to trust the programmer, rather than imposing restrictions on them. For example, Bullet adopts the open extension approaches of Julia and Go: an extension written by a user of a library is syntactically on an equal footing to the functionality of the library itself. Instead of trying to divine the possible uses of a language feature, Bullet strives to give the programmer the tools to "skin" those language features in a way they see fit. This is facilitated via an underlying syntax which is inspired by s-expressions. However, Bullet is also inspired by whitespace-sensitive notations such as Python and Markdown, which over the last decade have proven popular among both programmers and scientists alike. Bullet draws inpiration from libraries such as LLVM and higher level wrappers of those like CPython, Numba, and other languages such as Julia. Bullet sees AOT compilation as just simply a JIT run at compile time whose binary output is stored for later execution; Bullet supports two modes of execution: interpreted and machine code.
We care about:
- fast
- open, extensible
- power
- intuitive
- simple
- orthogonal design
We believe that:
- good design is emergent
- the programmer can be trusted
- the language designer is just another user
We don't care about:
- safety
- stupid programmers
- OO
- dependent types, and other exotic type features
- offers the dynamism of Python
- a record types's very fields are mutable; it becomes simply a dictionary
- you can manipulate syntax, programmatically create new definitions, etc.
- But unlike Python, this language is still
- non-latently typed.
- uses value semantics
- any code headed by a "meta" tag is run in the interpreter
- if that code block is itself within a block that is compiled, then
- an instance of the interpreter is bundled in the compiled code.
- an automatic bridge is created so that variables in the compiled code are visible within the interpreted code