Drizzle

Drizzle is my very own programming language, simultaneously developed as a language I would like to use and a never-ending source of things to learn.

Name

This project was originally called Sapphire. I decided to make an organisation for this project as it would surely consist of multiple projects and I really enjoy having projects grouped into Organisations.

However, when I tried to do so, I found that sapphire and sapphire-lang were both taken in terms of names, and there were a few programming language projects named Sapphire on GitHub. So I felt I needed to change the name.

Being a fan of Pokémon, my first thought was Kyogre, the legendary from Pokémon Sapphire. From there I thought of his ability Drizzle, which I thought was a nice name for my language considering I also love rain, so there you go!

(Also I already had made stickers of the logo so I had to stick with blue and stuff >.>)

Installation

Installation instructions have been moved here

Goals

The goals of the project are (in some particular order):

• Create a language with a nice syntax that I would like to use.
• Constantly learn ways to improve the language.
• Learn about the kind of work that goes into developing production grade languages.
• Eventually get Drizzle to the point where it can interpret / compile itself.

Notes

• It would be nice if the project could maintain a side-by-side interpreter and compiler so that drizzle could have a fully functional REPL environment built into the language, or maybe provide drizzle-interpreter as a separate package or something idk
• The more I go through the interpreter book, the more I realise that translating the ANTLR parser every time I add something new might not be worth the hassle.
  • However, if I can do it in a smart way, I should only have to translate the whole thing once, and figure out how to add stuff manually going forward in the same style to keep the benefits
• Could generate the parser in a different language and commit that to source control
• Then whenever I make updates, I do it in a separate branch and use the PR to update the Crystal version

Contributing

This project is open to anyone who wants to learn anything about creating programming languages!

A goal for early stages is to keep documentation at a high enough quality that it will hopefully be easy to follow what's going on, but if not then please open an issue!

Contributors

• freyamade: creator, designer, maintainer