Noa

Note

Noa is currently a heavily work-in-progress project. The current state of the project does not fully represent what the final result is meant to look like.

Noa is a dynamically typed, imperative, compiled programming language. The language features a familiar C/JS/Rust-like syntax with static variable resolution (so no "variable is not defined" errors!) and a lightweight featureset. Jump down to the samples section for some code samples!

Noa compiles to its own cross-platform bytecode format Ark which in turn can be run through the Noa runtime.

In addition to the language itself, Noa also features a VSCode extension with full(-ish) language support! The extension currently supports basic syntax highlighting, error messages, basic intellisense, go to definition, find all references, and renaming symbols!

This merely a passion project of mine and is not meant to be taken seriously! It's not meant to be a "production-ready" language, but I hope to one day be able to write some somewhat useful programs in it.

Installation

Note

Noa can currently only be compiled from source.

Compile from source

To compile and install Noa from source, you need the .NET 8 SDK and runtime and Cargo to compile the compiler and runtime respectively. Once you have .NET and Cargo installed, follow these instructions:

1. Clone the repo using git clone https://github.com/thinker227/noa.git.
2. cd into the root of the project (the folder which contains this readme file).
3. Run the update-tool.sh script (or the commands therein, they're all just .NET commands) which will compile and install the complier as a .NET tool. Worry not, you can easily uninstall it using dotnet tool uninstall noa --global.
4. cd into src/runtime and run cargo build -r which will compile the runtime.
5. Locate the produced executable (which should be in target/release named noa_runtime or noa_runtime.exe on Windows).
6. Create an environment variable named NOA_RUNTIME containing the file path to the runtime executable. Alternatively you can specify the --runtime <path> command-line option when running noa run to manually specify the path to the runtime executable, however it's much simpler to use an environment variable.
7. You'll usually have to restart your terminal and/or pc for the environment variable and .NET tool to be available.

After everything has been installed, you can invoke the Noa CLI using the noa command from your terminal!

VSCode extension

Compile from source

To compile and install the VSCode extension from source, you need Node.js and vsce. Also make sure you have code available from the command line.

1. cd into src/vscode-extension and run npm install followed by npm run compile.
2. Run vsce package. If it warns you that a license file cannot be found, type y and enter to continue.
3. Run code --install-extension <path>, replacing <path> with the file path to the .vsix file which vsce generated.

Project status

• AST
• Lexer
• Parser
• Scope/symbol resolution
• Flow analysis
• Optimization
• Bytecode
• Runtime
• CLI
• Language server

Samples

Warning

Some of these samples may currently not work.

print("Hello world!");

let x = 0;

x = 1; // ERROR: x is immutable

let mut y = 2;

y = 3; // fine

let x = {      // Block expression
    let a = 1;
    let b = 2;
    a + b      // Implicit return from block
};

func add(a, b) => a + b;

let num = add(1, 2);

func greet(name) {
    print("Hello, " + name + "!");
};

let name = readLine();
greet(name);

func createCounter() {
  let mut x = 0;
  () => {
    x += 1;
    x
  }
}

let counter = createCounter();
print(counter()); // 1
print(counter()); // 2
print(counter()); // 3

Dreamlands

// Import module
import "module.noa" (foo, bar, baz);

// Export stuff
export (val, hello);

let val = 69;
let hello = () => print("Hello!!!");