Salt

Welcome to Salt. This is a compiled, interpreted programing language running in a virtual machine enviroment.

Directories:

• lib - standard library of Salt
• doc - md, txt & html documentation
• saltc - salt compiler
• svm - salt virtual machine

The language

Salt is designed to be intuitive, but also with a lot of rules and syntax from other known languages. Each .salt file is called a module, and each module can import another module.

Let's start with a simple hello world:

public main() {
    print("Hello world");
}

As you can see, all functions either start with public or private, showing their avaibility for other modules. The main function is always public. The print function is a global function always imported into your module.

To run a Salt program you need to compile it first. This can be done using saltc (or whatever other compiler you are using). The -o flag defines the output of the compiler. To run a compiled program use svm.

$ saltc ./hello.salt -o hello.scc
$ svm ./hello.scc

There we go! Our first program.

Hello world

Types

Salt is a strongly typed language thus type-correctness is enforced by the compiler. To create a variable which has the number value of 123, you can use an int.

int x = 123;

As you can see, the syntax is very simmilar to other typed programming languages, and that's the goal of Salt - to be understandable.

The base types in Salt are:

Type	Description
int	integer value (−9,223,372,036,854,775,807 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808)
float	floating point value
string	dynamic length string
bool	can be true or false
null	no value

Installation

Linux

Clone the repository and run:

$ ./install.sh

This script:

• Builds the compiler & virtual machine
• Creates a salt home in ~/.local/salt
• Adds $SALT_HOME to ~/.bashrc
• Adds $SALT_HOME/bin to $PATH
• Moves compiled programs, lib and doc to salt home
• Make clean for both saltc and svm

Windows

WIP, for now you can use WSL

Contributing

If you want to contribute, you must always follow these rules:

• Keep the style the same as the code around you
• Everything must be atleast in English
• Each source code file must contain the copyright header
• Don't step on other's people toes - make your own branch
• When changing something in an existing file, add your name to the copyright header
• Keep the same format of commit messages (subject: change)