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Features

  • ✓ Lightweight, concise, and consistent syntax design, easy to master and quick to get started
  • ✓ Strong typing, static analysis and compilation, memory safety, exception handling, easily write safe and reliable software
  • ✓ Built-in concurrency primitives: go/future/channel/select
  • ✓ Directly compiles to target platform machine code with cross-compilation and linking support, no third-party libraries like llvm required
  • ✓ Simple deployment, efficient compilation, static linking based on musl libc with excellent cross-platform characteristics
  • ✓ Complete type system supporting generics, union types, interface, nullable(?), errable(!)
  • ✓ High-performance GC implementation with very short STW (Stop The World)
  • ✓ High-performance memory allocator implementation, referencing tcmalloc
  • ✓ High-performance shared stack coroutine implementation, capable of millions of coroutine switches per second
  • ✓ High-performance IO based on libuv implementation
  • ✓ Pure C implementation of high-performance runtime and compiler
  • ✓ Built-in data structures vec/map/set/tup and common standard library implementations
  • ✓ Function calls follow system ABI, built-in libc, convenient for calling C standard library functions
  • ✓ Centralized package management system npkg
  • ✓ Editor LSP support
  • ○ More controllable GC implementation, such as gc switch, fast free obj, etc.
  • ○ Cross-linker based on zig build source code and refactoring
  • ○ Cooperative scheduling system improvements
  • ○ Compilation target support for golang, wasm

Project Overview

The Nature programming language has reached an early usable version with stable syntax APIs. There will be no major changes before version 1.0, and subsequent versions will add some necessary and commonly used syntax features such as enum, ternary operators, struct labels, etc.

The current version compilation target architectures include linux_amd64, linux_arm64, linux_riscv64, darwin_amd64, darwin_arm64. Future versions will compile to Windows platform using zig ld.

Nature includes a set of test cases and standard libraries to test basic functionality and syntax availability, contains a set of small to medium projects to test overall availability, but has not yet been tested with large-scale projects.

Installation

1️⃣ Download the binary package suitable for your system from https://github.com/nature-lang/nature/releases and extract it.

2️⃣ Move the nature folder to the /usr/local directory. If you need to install nature in another directory, please manually set the NATURE_ROOT environment variable to point to the nature directory.

/usr/local/nature/
├── LICENSE-APACHE
├── LICENSE-MIT
├── VERSION
├── bin
├── lib
└── std

3️⃣ Add the /usr/local/nature/bin directory to your system environment variables, for example cat ~/.zshrc

...
export PATH="/usr/local/nature/bin:$PATH"
...

4️⃣ Run the command nature --version to check the current version

> nature --version
nature vx.x.x - release build 1970-01-01

5️⃣ Run the command nature -h to view help

> nature -h
Nature Programming Language Compiler vx.x.x

Usage:
  nature [command] [flags] [arguments]
...

Hello World

Create a main.n file

import fmt  
  
fn main() {  
    fmt.printf('hello nature')
}

Compile and run the binary file main

> nature build main.n && ./main
hello nature

Specify compilation target platform and architecture

> nature build --target darwin_amd64 main.n

Specify output binary file name as hello

> nature build -o hello main.n

Project Examples

mysql/postgresql/redis drivers https://github.com/weiwenhao/dbdriver

sqlite driver https://github.com/weiwenhao/nature-sqlite

RESTful API example https://github.com/weiwenhao/emoji-api

Lightweight container packaging tool and runtime https://github.com/weiwenhao/parker

Llama2 inference model implementation https://github.com/weiwenhao/llama.n

Tetris game based on raylib https://github.com/weiwenhao/tetris

More syntax examples https://github.com/nature-lang/nature/tree/master/tests/features/cases

Editor Support

The LSP server nls is already installed with the nature installation package in the /usr/local/nature/bin directory.

ls -lh /usr/local/nature/bin
total 44696
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  wheel   764K Feb 24 13:18 nature
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  wheel   6.1M Feb 24 13:20 nls
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  wheel    15M Feb 24 13:20 npkg

Search for "nature language" in the VSCode extension marketplace to download the LSP client and start using it.

Learn More

Syntax documentation https://nature-lang.org/docs/syntax

Standard library documentation https://nature-lang.org/stds

Online playground https://nature-lang.org/playground

Contribution guide https://nature-lang.org/docs/contribute