Minnie

Minnie is programming language designed for productive and safe software development that uses advanced features to make programming less frustrating and great for large, collaborative, code-bases.

Goals:

• Familiar rust-like syntax but without lifetimes
• Statically typed but with optional type annotations -- You only specify types if you want
• An efficient runtime with minimal garbage collection
• Easy to learn with great documentation
• Integrate with the rust ecosystem
• Built for the cloud:
  • run security and efficiently on serverless compute platforms
  • statically linked binaries with fast startup times
  • run in browsers as WebAssembly

See the draft design doc for more info about where the language is heading and a list of references that influence how the language is implemented.

Getting Started

Example: hello.min

// This is a very early example. We don't have strings yet!
fn factorial(num: int) -> int {
    if num == 1 {
        1
    } else {
        num * factorial(num - 1)
    }
}

pub fn main() {
    print_num(factorial(3));
}

This project requires a rust toolchain to build the software. If you don't have rust, you can get it at [rustup.rs] or you can run the installer with:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Now you can check out this project from git and get started.

Compile and run hello.min in one step with:

cargo run -- hello.min

To compile the source file into the wasm format, run the compiler through cargo:

cargo run -p minnie-compiler -- hello.min

This outputs hello.minw which contains WebAssembly source.

Participating

I welcome contributors, potential partners, and fellow enthusiasts who just want to leave a comment. This project is in its infancy so there is no GitHub Organization or foundation set up to administer it and no Code of Conduct. But if people express an interest in this work, I will enthusiastically set up an Organization and make it "ours", not "mine". Please don't let the fact that one person began the project stop you from sharing in its future ownership and community.

There are plenty of easy tasks that I have set aside for someone looking for a small thing to poke at and get merged in. Open an issue, PR, or email me to get started.

Code Layout

Core

This library is shared by the compiler and runtime. It implements compilation and execution.

Compiler

Compiles a program to WebAssembly. It only targets the minnie runtime but it will also target browsers in the future.

Runtime

Runs a program. If you give it a source file, it will compile and then run it.

REPL

An experimental REPL that doesn't support much of the language yet.

Test

The acceptance test suite which has its own README.