Xanathar

Name inspired by Xanathar's Guide to Everything (© Wizards of the Coast)

Pipeline

Made in draw.io

Features

• Compiles directly to a binary (through LLVM IR)
• Fast (uses Lark and LLVMLite) for speed
• Strong typing (enforced by LLVM IR)
• Easy to learn syntax
• Written in Python, so no installation required

Spec

Implemented operations

Keep in mind, Xanathar is a huge WIP

• Variables (statically allocated)
  • Int / UInt
    • 1 Bit (Bool)
    • 8 Bit (Char)
    • 16 Bit
    • 32 Bit
    • 64 Bit
    • 128 Bit
    • 512 Bit
    • 1024 Bit
  • Floats
  • Strings (implemented as a statically allocated int8[])
• Printing
  • libc printf can be used
  • print_s, print_i, print_x, print_c print with the printf format string (%s for print_s, etc.)
    • Implemented as a libc call to printf with the corresponding format string
    • Deprecated in favour of printf
• Casting
  • Works!
  • string >> int gives pointer to the int'th character in string
    • useful for (e.g.) printf
• Loops
  • While and For
    • While loops: more like a C-style do-while
    • For loops: similar to a do-while style loop
• Modules
  • stdio
    • i8* get[i8*, i32]
      • Implements fgets in C (source can be viewed in stdlib/stdio.c)

It's the best of both worlds: it keeps the amazing speed of low-level languages, but with the power and ease of high-level languages. On a test of the Collatz conjecture, run for i = 1 to 10, and 77,031, (100 runs of the entire program) Python 3 ran in 1.9s, whereas Xanathar ran in 0.064s. For 1000 runs of the program, Python 3 took 20.7s whereas Xanathar took 0.531s.