roadmap.md

Roadmap

Language features

• Statically sized arrays (i.e. size of array is known at compile time)
• Large arrays (64 bit element count)
• Nested namespaces, imports, type aliases; improved symbol resolution rules
• Container initializers (e.g. nums := Array [1, 2, 3])
• Lambda functions
• Compile time evaluation of expressions and functions
• Custom enum backing type (currently fixed to uint)
• Checked integer arithmetic (via checked keyword)
• Use numbers, strings, characters with match statement; match expressions
• Multiple statements per line with ;
• Single line blocks (e.g. if x { ... })
• Variable redeclarations (e.g. x := ""; x ::= 1)
• Delayed type inference (e.g. x := ---; x = 2)
• Optional function parameters with a default value
• Functions with variable number of arguments
• Unicode character type; support full unicode character range
• Fully general container iteration (currently container types are hardcoded in compiler)
• Sequences: allow the use of constructs like filter/map with the performance of a for loop
• #Export attribute to customize visibility (mainly for library authors)
• defer statement
• Operator overloading
• Discriminated unions
• Builtin serialization of any type
• labels, goto statement
• Closures
• Meta-programming via plugin API for the compiler

Code generation

• LLVM backend
• x86 backend (maybe, non-optimizing backend, fast compilation)
• WASM backend (maybe)
• Code reachability analysis
• Tree shaking (remove unused functions from binary)
• Generic function deduplication (merge identical variants)
• Function inlining (never, hint, always)
• Define memory aliasing model
• SIMD support
• Inline asm support
• Incremental compilation
• Support more platforms and architectures

C interop

• Auto-generate .h file for .mu files
• Support c unions
• Support custom calling conventions

Standard library

• Reduce dependency on libc (remove completely on Windows)
• Basic abandonment handlers (e.g. print stack trace)
• Platform independent math functions, floating point printing/parsing
• Platform independent file I/O
• Platform independent threads, locks, channels (basic producer/consumer)
• Platform independent unicode string manipulation
• Platform independent time measurement
• More allocators
• Provide wrappers for good libraries for date/time handling, network I/O (TCP, UDP, HTTP, HTTPS)
• Provide wrappers for common libraries, such as various OS APIs, OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan, SDL, etc.

Tests & docs

• Full test coverage of the compiler
• Benchmarks and performance comparisons with other languages
• Document all behavior, including all platform specific behavior
• Document the entire standard library

Tools

• REPL
• Hot reloading
• Debugger
• Profiler
• More extensions for popular editors (in addition to the VS Code extension)