What is it?

Zomp is a small but powerful programming language. It combines C like low level access to the machine with a Lisp style macro system. Together this allows writing high performance applications and gives library developers a lot of power. It features

• Lisp-like macro system to add new language constructs in libraries
• Full hardware access through, pointers, manual memory management etc.
• Interactive shell for rapid prototyping (similar to irb, python)
• Powerful and friendly syntax which allows to express new language constructs without changing the grammar

It is heavy work-in-progress but already usable for writing small applications. Currently there is not a lot of documentation. You can browse the testsuite and the examples to get an idea what you can do or have a look at build/release-x86_64/doc.

Zomp’s website is at http://zompc.net.

Building

Currently only the OS X port is tested and maintained. To get started:

Install dependencies

• Get a Mac with OS X 10.10.3 or newer (10.9 might work)
• Make sure XCode3 has been installed
• Install XCode developer tools
• Install homebrew (http://brew.sh/) If you already have it installed make sure to update package info:

  brew update
      

• Install glfw 2.7.9, glew 1.11.0, anttweakbar 1.16, assimp 3.1.1

  brew install glew anttweakbar assimp homebrew/versions/glfw2
      

• Optionally install graphviz (only need if you want graphs of module dependencies, etc.)

  brew install graphviz
      

• Install OCaml 4.02 and menhir 20140422

  brew install opam
  opam init
      

  Follow the instructions that it prints to finish setup.

  opam install menhir
      

Build

• Clone this repository and cd into it

  brew install git
  git clone https://github.com/sheijk/Zomp.git
  cd Zomp
      

• Install LLVM+clang binaries

  ./build.sh external_tools_bin_darwin
      

• Build Zomp

  ./build.sh -j8 -ks all
      

• Optionally run tests

  ./build.sh -j8 -ks test
      

Build products end up in build/release-x86_64/. report.html shows build/test results and docs, deploy contains compiler exes.

Running

./examples/wobble.exe

Run examples. Note that several of the OpenGL based ones currently crash.

zompc -c foo.zomp

Will produce foo.ll. Run “make -n examples/mini.exe” to see commands to turn this into an executable.

zompsh

Will start the interactive Zomp shell. This is meant to be run from an IDE/editor. Load source/zomp.el in Emacs, open a Zomp source file and click “Zomp / Start/update” in the menu bar.

History, Goals

The requirement was to have a language that at the same time delivers the same performance and low level control as C and allows more productive development. This goal is approached by providing a minimal base language extendable by macros and an interactive shell which supports modifying the code of a running application for fast prototyping. It does not attempt to protect against memory errors and other low level conditions.

Zomp’s fundamental concept is to create a language which gives much more power to library developers than most existing languages do. It is intended to provide much of the expressiveness and extensibility of higher level languages like Lisp, Haskell, Python or Ruby for those application domains where C and C++ still dominate like graphics programming and embedded/real-time systems.

Languages like C, Pascal and C++ provide a fixed set of constructs like loops, classes etc. from which programs can be composed. Even though these constructs are sufficient to write large programs many applications can benefit from the possibility to extend the language with custom constructs. There have been languages which allow this for a long time, like Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby, Python etc.

The goal of Zomp is to create a programming language in which libraries cannot only provide new data types and functions but also new programming language constructs and which on the same time allows the user full access to the underlying hardware.

It’s intended target audience is currently only myself - getting a new programming language to be adapted is a task better suited to large companies than small developer teams so I will stick to a reasonable objective: building a language of my taste to use for my spare time projects.

How to contribute / license

Zomp has been created by Jan Rehders and is published under MIT license. Use github for bug reports, feeedback, and patches: https://github.com/sheijk/Zomp