The Astro Programming Language

Work in Progress 🚧

Current Version: 0.1.15a

What is Astro?

Astro is a fun programming language designed for safe high-performance applications. It is essentially a statically-typed systems language that

• facilitates rapid prototyping,
• features high-level abstractions with zero overhead,
• ensures memory safety without a (tracing) Garbage Collector, and
• supports data-race-free concurrency.

Why create yet another programming language?

The language creator had a set of requirements (listed above) not met by any language (Rust comes close). Although, the project started as an educational effort, it later shaped into a language designed to meet those requirements.

SIMD, threads and direct access to Web APIs are planned for WebAssembly. These and other proposals for GPU Compute will make the web a desirable HPC target in the near future. Astro is, for this reason, designed for high-performance apps that are expected to run on the server or in the browser.

In order to match up with the expressiveness and productivity of dynamic programming languages, Astro adds full type inference, structural typing, and some other high-level abstractions that reduce boilerplate code commonly associated with statically-typed languages. It feels like a scripting language for the most part.

Python

def times(a, b):
    sum = a
    for i in range(b):
        sum += sum
    return sum

Astro

fun times(a, b) {
    var sum = a
    for i in range(b) {
        sum += sum
    }
    return sum
}

Astro is supposed to be high-level enough to write python-like scripts but also low-level enough to write an operating system kernel. Therefore, it doesn't have a traditional garbage collector instead it relies on lifetime analysis at compile-time that free memory once they are no longer referenced.

How close is Astro to being ready for use?

Not close. Astro is at its infancy, there are several tasks to complete before it becomes usable.

For now, Astro can compile its source code to ast format. It is not ready for even the simplest application. It is also currently implemented Rust (it was being implemented in Javascript and C++), however, the plan is to bootstrap the compiler (implement it in Astro) once it is sufficiently well-featured.

Where can I read about the language?

There is no thorough documentation for the language yet since the main implementation is still in active development, however, you can find an up-to-date summary of language features here.

How do I install it?

N/A

Want to contribute to the project?

Please read the code of conduct and contribution guidelines. We welcome your ideas and contributions.

Do you have an unanswered question?

Please open an issue and ask questions, offer to help, point out bugs or suggest features.

Attributions

Astro logo made by Freepik

License

Apache 2.0