Zolang âą ZolangTemplates âą Zolang IDE
Zolang is a programming language theoretically transpilable to virtually any other programming language.
Zolang does this by offloading code generation to its users through Stencil (template language) specification files.
Zolang is a lightweight frontend for virtually any general purpose programming language.
Theoretically though, these (.stencil) specification files could make Zolang output any kind of text. Making the language a very useful code generation tool.
Zolang doesn't try to be a general purpose programming language, it is limited in features and is yet to have a standard library, so why use Zolang instead of other programming languages?
The idea for Zolang came from within a fast moving startup. It was moving fast in the sense that the tech stack was rapidly changing every now and then, the product had projects in 4 languages, Swift, TypeScript, JavaScript and Ruby. All of which had duplications in definitions of models.
So every time the tech stack changed drastically, changes had to be made in many of the (if not all four) implementations. So we wanted a language where we could write the model layer of our application with a single source of truth, generating code for all of our programming languages.
I'm a Star Wars fan and in the Star Wars world Zolan is the home planet of a species called clawdites, who are known for their ability to transform their appearance to look like virtually any other creature.
As the language aims to be transpilable to virtually any other programming language the clawdites came quickly to mind. Sadly the species doesn't have a catchy name, so I found myself falling back to their planet Zolan. And since this is a language and lang is often used as an abbreviation for language the "g" was soon to follow.
- Access Levels
- Comments
- Default Values
- Type checking
- For loop
- Hot reload (compilation)
- Function mutation
Then setup Zolang as a command line tool locally
chmod +x $HOME/Downloads/Zolang
mv $HOME/Downloads/Zolang /usr/local/bin
If you don't have Mint you can get it from its GitHub page
Then install Zolang:
mint install Zolang/Zolang
g clone https://github.com/Zolang/Zolang
cd Zolang
swift build -c release -Xswiftc -static-stdlib
cd .build/release
cp -f Zolang /usr/local/bin/zolang
zolang
Zolang is best with Visual Studio Code using the zolang-ide extension
If you don't have an existing project start by creating a project folder and navigate to it
mkdir MyZolangProject
cd MyZolangProject
Then initialize the project
zolang init
This will create a zolang.json file that will be used to specify build settings for your Zolang and setup the project's file structure.
A typical zolang.json project compiling to Swift and Kotlin would look something like this:
{
"buildSettings": [
{
"sourcePath": "./zolang/src",
"stencilPath": "./zolang/templates/swift",
"buildPath": "./zolang/build/swift",
"fileExtension": "swift",
"separators": {
"CodeBlock": "\n"
}
},
{
"sourcePath": "./zolang/src",
"stencilPath": "./zolang/templates/kotlin",
"buildPath": "./zolang/build/kotlin",
"fileExtension": "kt",
"separators": {
"CodeBlock": "\n"
}
}
]
}Notice the ./templates/swift and ./templates/kotlin This is the location of the .stencil files that customize the actual code generation process. The Zolang organization has a repo of supported languages.
./zolang/src is where all the Zolang code is stored.
đ P.S. It only took around an hour to add the templates needed to be able to compile Zolang to both Kotlin and Swift! So you shouldn't restrain yourself from using Zolang if your favorite language is not yet supported. Just add it and continue hacking.
We could create a file ./zolang/src/Person.zolang
describe Person {
name as text
street as text
number as number
friendNames as list of text
address return text from () {
let addr as text be "${street} ${number}"
print("Fetching address ${addr}")
return addr
}
speak return from (message as text) {
print("${name} says ${message}")
}
}
let person as Person be Person("John Doe", "John's Street", 8, [ "Todd" ])
make person.name be "Jane Doe"
person.speak("My address is ${person.address()}")
Lets say we wanted to print something like 1 + 2 + (3 * 4) / 5
In Zolang this would be written:
print("${1 plus 2 plus (3 times 4) over 5}")
let i as number be 1
while (i < person.friendNames.count) {
print(person.friendNames[i])
make i be i plus 1
}
Just ...
zolang build
... and enjoy checking out the readable code generated to ./zolang/build/swift/Person.swift and ./zolang/build/kotlin/Person.kt
Zolang has 4 primitive types
- boolean
- text
- number
- list
Values are either true or false
See section below on operators for further information
Defined within double quotes
"a piece of text"
You can format a piece of text usign ${...}
"this is a string with an embedded variable: ${someVar}"
The limitation when it comes to text in Zolang is that the language doesn't care for characters that need to be escaped.
The text: "this is a text \n" would remain unchanged when compiling to other languages which might become a problem if \n is handled differently in the other languages the Zolang code is being compiled to. Thankfully languages seem to handle character escaping in a somewhat similar fassion so most of the time this does not make a difference.
Zolang currently only has one type to represent numbers.
Numbers work just as you expect:
let num1 as number be 0.12345
let num2 as number be 5
The same goes for lists they represent ... you guessed it, lists of data; and are declared by using the list keyword followed by a of keyword and the type of the element you want to represent.
List literals are defined with a comma separated sequence of expressions wrapped inside enclosing brackets [...]
let myList as list of text be [ "1", "2", "3" ]
There are 2 supported prefix operators in Zolang
- and not, the former is meant to be used for numbers and latter for boolean types
Besides not there are 3 boolean infix operators or, and, not and equals
Other operators are <, >, <=, >=, plus, minus, times and over, representing, less-than, greater-than, lesser-than-or-equal, greater-than-or-equal, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division respectively
NOTE! Watch out for precedence. Zolang offloads precedence handling to the languages being compiled to. With types that are of number type this is seldom an issue but as Zolang doesn't currently support type checking, any operator can be used on any type, so beware.
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2018 Thorvaldur Runarsson
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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