Maxwell is a modern, high-level programming language that aims to combine the comfort and expressiveness of scripting languages with the power and efficiency of a compiled language. It aims to achieve the following goals:

• embrace refactoring as a natural part of programming
• keep repetition to a minimum (DRY)
• everything is an expression, i.e. no statements
• focus on generic programming
• imperative
• strict duck typing
• functions, strings, arrays, sets and maps are first class citizens
• implicit interfaces
• operator overloading
• type inference

Maxwell uses Semantic Versioning.

• code is written in C++11
• source files have suffix .cpp
• header files have suffix .hpp
• sources and headers live in the /maxwell directory
• everything lives in the maxwell namespace
• files may be grouped into directories for better readability and structure
• files containing subnamespaces of maxwell must be placed in directories with the same name as the corresponding namespace (e.g. maxwell::repository::interface classes are to reside in the maxwell/repository/interface directory)
• directory names are lowercase
• includes are sorted by
  • origin (Maxwell first, then third party, then standard headers)
  • alphabet
• using ... and using namespace ... only in sources, absolutely not in headers (except for rare cases where the directive is to apply to the entire code base)
• type names are capitalized (e.g. SourceRepository)
• function names are camel-cased and start with a verb (e.g. addFileToRepository)
• variable names are camel-cased (e.g. pendingFiles)
• accessor functions are named set... and get...
• no underscores in type, function, or member names
• nullptr instead of 0 or NULL for pointers
• tests live in the /test directory (not interleaved with the source code)
• no std::endl, use the UNIX line feed \n
• write good commit messages

To get things up and running create a build directory, ask cmake to generate a build system for you, and build the compiler as follows:

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ ln -s ../maxwell/runc.sh runc

The last command symlinks the ../maxwell/runc.sh script into your build directory so you can build things easily. This file calls the low-level plumbing commands that parse and process Maxwell source files, generate C code, and package the generated code into C source files. It then feeds this files to gcc to generate an executable.

Take a look at the tests directory for some sample snippets of Maxwell code; or write your own if you feel like it. To compile your source run ./runc yourfile.mw, which will compile your code to a.out. You might also be interested in the *.{c|h} files generated next to your source file, as they show you how the Maxwell compiler transforms your input to C code.

For the curious: The document language/Ideas.html contains random snippets of code and ideas.