Gyoji Programming Language

What is it?

Ths Gyoji programming language is intended to be a memory-safe low-level, general-purpose programming language. It is intended to be safer than C, and offer high-level features of C++ without the un-neccessary complexity. It is also intended to use many concepts from Rust like the borrow-checker without going "too far" and making too many assumptions about the "standard" library, the environment, or the way it should be used.

It uses the C ABI (largely thanks to LLVM and does NOT introduce exceptions or other constructs which would break ABI compatibility. It does NOT ever "panic" or halt execution without the programmer's explicit instruction to do so.

The syntax will be "familiar" to users of C, Java, C++, borrowing many ideas from prior art, but is not intended to be backward-compatible with any of them.

What it is NOT!

Gyoji is a programming language and NOT a build system. Discovering dependencies and compiling software is NOT the responsibility of a programming language. This is a question of separation of concerns and the language is intended to stand on its own as a programming language which is a set of instructions designed to tell a computer how to operate.

Gyoji is also not a package manager. Packaging and distributing source and object code is a separate concern also. While the compiler does produce binary code, the responsibility lies elsewhere in organizing the results of the compilation for distribution. There are many fine examples of package managers and one need not have a new package manager for every programming language. Gyoji makes no assumptions or restrictions on what package management techniques to use.

Gyoji is also not a standard library. While there is (or soon will be) a set of libraries written in the Gyoji library to perform certain tasks, it is not the responsibility of a programming language to prescribe things like lists, maps, sets, or algorithms. Those can be expressed in the Gyoji language and the language itself makes no assumptions about what libraries are and are not used. Again, this is a separation of concerns argument that allows the language to be general-purpose.

While it is ABI compatible with C (i.e. you can call back and forth between them), it is NOT syntax-compatible. (i.e. you can't just compile a random C file with it even though much of the syntax matches up pretty well). It is a NON-goal to be a "drop-in" replacement for GCC or CLANG.

What is a Gyoji?

The term Gyoji (行司) is borrowed from the world of professional Sumo. It is an honorable sport where one wrestler (rikishi 力士) attempts to push another one out of the ring (dohyō (土俵)). The Gyoji (行司) is the referee who determines who went out of the ring first. This is a nice metaphor for boundary-checking in programming. The Gyoji programming language is your referee, letting you know when you've gone out of bounds.

Why on EARTH do we need ANOTHER programming language.

Ok, so this is where it gets interesting. I love the C programming language because of its relative simplicity, but let's be honest. It simply wasn't designed with safety in mind, so I also kind-of hate it. I also love C++, but let's face it. It's riddled with little traps and undefined behaviors in the name of making things "abstract" and allowing implementations to make their own decisions. This abstraction, however, comes at very little benefit. In contrast, languages like Java are more prescriptive and define more behaviors, yet is still able to function well and used generally. C++ also has a problem with complexity in template metaprogramming which can be useful in limited circumstances, but in my opinion has gotten out of hand. Java is great, but I really don't like the GC and the lack of low-level control. Rust is cool too and has really good solutions to a lot of these problems, but that also comes at a great cost. Rust, in my opinion, makes far too many assumptions about the 'standard' and 'core' libraries and is full of 'panic()' in the most unexpected places. While it is quite memory safe, it is not at all 'termination' safe. For example, a sqrt of a negative value can cause the system to 'panic()'. This is not at all what I would characterize as 'safe'. Although it does not allow access to invalid memory, abrupt and unexpected termination is not a good thing.

So that leaves me with an urge to pull together some of the best ideas of each of these languages and try something new.

Maybe this is just an old man shouting into the wind, but this is a project I have to do and would love some help doing it.