====
Home
====

  The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language
  will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good
  name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
  -- D. E. Knuth


**This page is about the Nimrod programming language, which combines Lisp's
power with Python's readability and C's performance.**

Welcome to Nimrod
-----------------

.. container:: snippet
  *Nimrod looks like this:*
  
  .. code-block:: nimrod
    # Filter key=value pairs
    import re

    for x in lines("myfile.txt"):
      if x =~ re"(\w+)=(.*)":
        echo "Key: ", matches[0],
             " Value: ", matches[1]

**Nimrod** is a new statically typed, imperative
programming language, that supports procedural, object oriented, functional 
and generic programming styles while remaining simple and efficient. 
A special feature that Nimrod inherited from Lisp is that Nimrod's abstract 
syntax tree (*AST*) is part of the specification - this allows a powerful 
macro system which allows domain specific languages.

Nimrod is a compiled, garbage-collected systems programming language
which has an excellent productivity/performance ratio. Nimrod's design
focuses on the 3E: efficiency, expressiveness, elegance (in the order of
priority).


Nimrod is efficient
===================

* Native code generation (currently via compilation to C), not dependant on a
  virtual machine: **Nimrod produces small executables without dependencies
  for easy redistribution.**
* A fast non-recursive incremental and generational garbage collector that 
  should be well suited for soft real-time systems (like games).
* System programming features: Ability to manage your own memory and access the
  hardware directly. Pointers to garbage collected memory are distinguished
  from pointers to manually managed memory.
* Zero-overhead iterators.
* Cross-module inlining.
* Dynamic method binding with inlining and without virtual method table.
* Compile time evaluation of user-defined functions.
* Whole program dead code elimination: Only *used functions* are included in 
  the executable.
* Value-based datatypes: For instance, objects and arrays can be allocated on 
  the stack.


Nimrod is expressive
====================

* **The Nimrod compiler and all of the standard library are implemented in 
  Nimrod.**
* Built-in high level datatypes: strings, sets, sequences, etc.
* Modern type system with local type inference, tuples, variants, 
  generics, etc.
* User-defineable operators; code with new operators is often easier to read
  than code which overloads built-in operators. In the code snippet, the 
  ``=~`` operator is defined in the ``re`` module.
* Macros can modify the abstract syntax tree at compile time.


Nimrod is elegant
=================

* Macros can use the imperative paradigm to construct parse trees. Nimrod
  does not require a different coding style for meta programming.
* Macros cannot change Nimrod's syntax because there is no need for it. 
  Nimrod's syntax is flexible enough.
* Statements are grouped by indentation but can span multiple lines.
  Indentation must not contain tabulators so the compiler always sees
  the code the same way as you do.


Nimrod plays nice with others
=============================

* The Nimrod Compiler runs on Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac OS X.
  Porting to other platforms is easy.
* **There are bindings to GTK2, the Windows API, the POSIX API, OpenGL, SDL, 
  Cario, Python, Lua, TCL, X11, libzip, PRCE, ODBC, libcurl, mySQL and SQLite.** 
* A C to Nimrod conversion utility: New bindings to C libraries are easily 
  generated by ``c2nim``.
* A Pascal to Nimrod conversion utility: A large subset of Object Pascal
  can be translated to Nimrod automatically!
  

Roadmap to 1.0
==============

Version 0.8.x
  * threading

Version 0.9.0
  * closures and anonymous procs
  * recursive iterators/coroutines


Planned features beyond 1.0
===========================

* Other code generators: LLVM, EcmaScript.
* Symbol files to make the compiler incremental.