No fuss, just systems programming.
An evolution of the C language, designed to give the programmer more power over the underlying hardware. Cleaner, more expressive syntax, declaration order independence, no lossy implicit casts, proper bitfields, and fast builds through dependency management by the lowc compiler. If you write kernels or embedded code in C, you'll love Low.
Currently still missing from the language:
- unions
- enums
- cool literals
- switch
- defer
- methods, interfaces, type switch
- multiple return values
- threadlocal global variables
- slices (paritally implemented in #1)
- fixed-point type
- unsigned integer type
- big/little endian types
- proper bit masks
- macros/templates
Refer to 1 and 2 for the C grammar and lexical analysis specification. Refer to 3 for the LLVM IR specification, and 4 and 5 for the LLVM C API documentation. Refer to 6 for details on how defer, panic, and recover interact in the Go language.
To get an overview of the LLVM C/C++ API readelf -Ws /usr/lib/libLLVM.so can be used in case the online version is not helpful.
You might have to install LLVM and its dependencies first. Read on for a guide on that. Once you're setup, build the project as follows:
# for hackers and contributors
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debug ..
make
# for package maintainers
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=release ..
make
make install
Currently, the Low compiler only produces LLVM IR rather than native machine code. To build and run a program written in Low, do the following:
lowc foo.low
lli foo.ll
Refer to examples/deps for an example on how build Low files into a library and use a Makefile and the LLVM linker to package things into a final executable.
sudo apt-get install build-essentials llvm-3.6 llvm-3.6-dev zlib1g-dev libedit-dev cmake
# Install build tools, Note: this will pull a lot of packages,
# you may install them one by one, which ones is left as an exercise for the reader
sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries"
# Install build system and llvm dependencies
sudo dnf install cmake llvm llvm-devel