nest

A programming language with no keywords.

This programming language is still in development and can be unstable. Beta versions are not properly tested and might crash unexpectedly.

Features

• Dynamically typed
• Memory safe
• Interpreted
• Has hash maps, vectors and arrays built in
• Can be expanded with C/C++
• Aimed at being consistent within its design
• the standard library includes coroutines, a JSON parser and various other helper functions

Nest 0.15.0 planned features

• Improve libnest usage:
  • Separate execution and interpreter states
  • Initialize everything with one function
  • Quit everything with one function
  • Execute a program in one function (given the path of the file)
• Rewrite nodes, parser, compiler and optimizer
• Rename co.pause to co.yield
• Make the return value of co.yield the arguments passed to co.call when it is used to restart it
• Change co.call to accept less arguments than the function requires
• Change err.try to accept less arguments than the function requires
• Add is_space, lremove and rremove to stdsutil.nest
• Add batch to stditutil.nest
• Add enum to stdsequtil.nest
• Change generator in stdco.nest to allow for different arguments of the function
• Change relative_path in stdfs.nest to use the current working directory when no base is given
• Add get_capacity to stdsys.nest
• Improve option handling in stdjson.nest
• Remove _cwd_ and rename _get_cwd and _set_cwd to get_cwd and set_cwd in stdsys.nest
• Remove reversed from stditutil.nest and add reverse and reverse_i to stdsequtil.nest
• Rename split to lsplit and add rsplit to stdsutil.nest
• Better testing with C
• Finish implementing Nst_fmt and add a wrapper to stdsutil.nest

Future planned features

• Regular expressions in the standard library ¹
• A custom graphics and UI standard library built on top of SDL2 ²
• Closures
• Multithreading

Documentation

The documentation is hosted on ReadTheDocs and can be found here.

Installation

Windows Installer

To install Nest on Windows you will first need to install Visual C++ Redistributable that can be downloaded here:

Link	Architecture
https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe	64-bit
https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x86.exe	32-bit

After insalling it you can download the installer from the desired release and run it. It is recommended to add Nest to the PATH environment variable to use it from the terminal.

Once installed you can check that it is working by running this command:

PS C:\Users\user> nest -V
Using Nest version: beta-0.15.0 x64

Compile from source on Windows

To compile Nest from source you will need to install Visual Studio 17 or newer with the Desktop development with C++ package.

Once installed you can clone the repository and open the solution located in nest\build\windows\projects\nest\nest.sln and compile it from there.

To create the installer you need to install InnoSetup, then navigate to nest\build\windows and run update_exes.bat.

For this step you need to have either Nest already installed or Python 3 on your machine, in case you want to use Python run update_exes.bat py.

Once done you can navigate to nest\build\windows\installer and compile installer-script-x64.iss and installer-script-x86.iss.

Uninstalling on Windows

To uninstall Nest on Windows you can do so from the control panel.

Linux archive

To Install Nest from the precompiled binaries archive download the .tar.gz file with the desired architecture and extract it in the current directory with:

$ tar -xzf nest-[VERSION]-[ARCHITECTURE]-linux.tar.gz

Now run ./linux_install_[ARCHITECTURE].sh to copy the binaries to /usr/libs/nest and to /usr/bin and install the necessary libraries.

Compile from source on Linux

To compile Nest from source on Linux first clone the repository and enter in the directory. From here run sudo bash configure.sh to install the necessary libraries.

Note: if you are not using apt or dnf this file will not work.

Once you have installed the libraries you can enter nest/build/linux/makefiles/ and run make help to see what to compile. In general you will want to run make install or make install-x86.

Uninstalling on linux

To uninstall Nest on linux, copy nest/build/linux/uninstall.sh and execute it.

Plugins

VS Code

To install the VSCode extension download vs-code-extension-[VERSION].zip, extract it into %USERPROFILE%\.vscode\extensions on Windows or into ~/.vscode/extensions on Linux and reload the VS Code window.

Currently VS Code supports only syntax highlighting and commenting with keyboard shortcuts, to run the Nest file you can install Code Runner and add "nest": "cd $dir && nest $fileName" inside "code-runner.executorMap" in settings.json.

This method does not support input, to do that you can select the option to run Code Runner in the terminal.

Sublime Text

To install the Sublime Text plugin download sublime-text-plugin-[VERSION].zip from the latest release and extract it into %APPDATA%/SublimeText/Packages on Windows or into ~/.config/sublime-text/Packages on Linux.

In Sublime Text, in addition to syntax highlighting you can also run a script with CTRL + B and you can comment and un-comment with the default keyboard shortcuts.

Since Sublime Text does not support input from the user in the output panel, you have to run the file from a terminal emulator, to do that I suggest installing a plugin like Terminus.

Footnotes

1. will probably be a port of PCRE ↩

2. currently in the workings and undocumented ↩