The NIMBLE Programming Language

NIMBLE (Nam's Interpreted Modular Basic Language Engine) is a dynamically typed, interpreted programming language with C-like syntax. This repository contains the source code for the NIMBLE programming language's interpreter.

I started this project at the beginning of June 2024 with the goal of learning more about programming language design and practicing my C++ skills. It then gradually became one of my biggest projects yet.

The interpreter is not very optimized and there may be some bugs that I might have overlooked, but I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

Syntax

import "core:math";

// collatz conjecture function
fun collatz_conjecture(n)
{
    if (n % 2 == 0)
    {
        n = floordiv(n, 2);
        return n;
    }
    else if (n % 2 == 1)
    {
        n = 3 * n + 1;
        return n;
    }
}

mut n = input("Enter number: ");
mut i = 0;
mut li = [];

// main loop
while (n != 1)
{
    n = collatz_conjecture(n);
    li[i] = n;
    i += 1;
}

print(li);

NIMBLE is a dynamically typed programming language, featuring C-like syntax with class support and C++ inheritance syntax. It has a very "fun" syntax (because the function keyword is fun)

Requirements

Before compilation, you'll need to have these tools installed first:

• Clang or GCC (I built this with Clang but GCC works just fine)
• GNU Make

Project structure

Compiling and Running

If you're using make:

• make compile to compile the program into the bin/ directory
• make run to run the program
• make clean to clean up the object and binary files
• make test to run test cases
• make bench to run benchmarks

You can run the interpreter with make run or ./bin/nimble <filename>.nbl

Benchmark

Elapsed time of computationally intensive programs:

Documentation

You can find the documentation in the doc directory. You can also learn about the syntax of the language through example programs found in the examples directory.

Plans for this project

For now, most of the features of the language and the interpreter is complete. Currently, I'm working on the documentation for this interpreter.

Hopefully I could integrate this project with LLVM and create a compiler for this language for improved performance and speed in the future.

VSCode syntax support

I've created a VSCode extension for the language. You can checkout the extension here

References

• Making a Programming Language & Interpreter in under 10 minutes
• Writing An Interpreter In Go
• Crafting Interpreters
• Make YOUR OWN Programming Language in Python
• Let's Write an Interpreter (in 168 Lines of Python)
• My First Language Frontend with LLVM Tutorial