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Rivet logo

The Rivet programming language

A general-purpose programming language, focused on simplicity, safety and stability.

Website • Documentation • Roadmap • Changelogs • Examples

issues status license

Note

The compiler is currently on a hiatus, I will soon return to continue its development, in the meantime, I am focusing on other projects; I'm currently working on a compiler that generates Lua code: BlueScript.

Rivet's goal is to be a very powerful programming language and at the same time easy to use, with a syntax that is the result of mixing Go + Zig + C# and other languages such as Python, Lua, TypeScript, D, Swift, etc.

Currently, Rivet uses C as the only backend and generates C99 code that is compiled using a C compiler (by default, gcc or clang). The idea is that in the long term there will be other backends available for code generation, such as LLVM or WebAssembly, and also that there will be an interpreter available.

You can find information on how to build Rivet on your computer by going to the documentation.

Why?

There are many programming languages today, each specialized in a specific field or in solving a certain problem.

Rivet is the materialization of my thinking about what a perfect, secure, fast, readable, powerful, simple and multi-platform programming language would be like.

Rivet takes the best features of existing programming languages and tries to unify them into a single programming language, so that software development has the best possible quality.

Features

  • Easy-to-learn syntax: A syntax without overload of unnecessary elements.
  • Named and optional arguments: Very useful, my_func(arg0: 5).
  • Not NULL values by default: This is only possible with option types (?T) and none.
  • Easy error handling: With result types, func my_func() -> !T { ... }, throw and catch.
  • Immutable values: Variables and fields are immutable by default. structs have internal immutability.
  • Polymorphism: Traits, Embedded Structs and Tagged Enums are supported.
  • Generics: Specialize and reuse the same code for different types (coming soon).

More features that will be added in the self-hosted compiler can be seen in the roadmap.

Example: The classic Hello World!

import std/console;

func main() {
    console.writeln("Hello World!");
}

More examples in the examples/ folder. It is also possible to find valid code examples in the tests/valid folder.

Important

Currently the language is in alpha state, and therefore its syntax and the language API is not stable, and may change in the long term. Not all features are implemented.

Compiler version 0.1.0 will be released when the self-hosted compiler can compile itself successfully.

Only linux is supported for now. Windows is not well supported, and macOS is not supported yet. Any help to provide full support for both Windows and macOS is welcome.

Read CONTRIBUTING to get more information.