🚀 Marshal Documentation

Welcome to the official documentation for Marshal! 🎉 Marshal is a compiled programming language built with C# and .NET 8.0, leveraging the LLVM backend to generate machine code. Marshal is an educational project but I'm planning to push it to it's limits! 💻✨

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🛠️ Getting Started

Marshal is easy to set up and use. Whether you're an experienced developer or a student eager to learn compiler design, this documentation will help you get started!

Prerequisites

• ✅ A modern operating system (Linux, macOS, or Windows)
• ✅ .NET SDK 8.0 or newer installed
• ✅ LLVM version 17.0.6 or newer installed

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📦 Installation

Step 1: Clone the Repository

Start by downloading the Marshal project:

git clone https://github.com/Gray-SS/Marshal.git

Step 2: Build the compiler

Navigate to the project directory and build the compiler:

cd Marshal/src/Marshal.Compiler
dotnet build

🌟 Hello World

Here’s your first program in Marshal. 🎉
Create a file named hello.msl and add the following code:

func extern puts(str: string): int;

func main(): int {
    puts("Hello World!");
    return 0;
}

As you can probably see, Marshal doesn't have any standard library done yet, so we're using the good old puts function from the c standard library

To compile and run the program:

marshalc -i hello.ms -o hello
./hello

Expected output:

Hello World!

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🔑 Key Features

• LLVM-Optimized: Marshal leverages LLVM for machine code generation. (no optimisation layer at the moment) 🚀
• Cross-Platform: Marshal runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. (probably) 🌐
• Extensible: A great base for adding new features and testing language ideas. 🔧

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📝 Language Syntax

📊 Variables

Declare and initialize variables in Marshal:

var age: int = 25;
var name: string = "Alice";

🧮 Functions

Define reusable functions:

//There is no string concatenation at the moment. Yeah, I really need to implement that
func greet(name: string): void {
    puts("Hello, ");
    puts(name);
    puts("!");
}

🔄 Control Flow

Control your program's logic with conditions:

//Control the flow of the program with conditions
if (x > 10) {
    puts("Greater than 10!");
} else if (x < 10) {
    puts("10 or less.");
} else {
    puts("10");
}

//while loop running until 'i' is greater than 10
var i: int = 0;
while (i < 10) {
    puts(i);
    i++;
}

Structs

Structures are value types and are allocated on the stack. I took inspiration from c# where I found this variation very interesting. Their value are copied when passing to a function.

struct Vector2 {
    x: int;
    y: int;
}

🌌 Comments

Add single-line comments with //:

// This is a comment
var x: int = 42; // Another comment

/*
    This is also a comment
*/

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🤝 Contributing

Marshal is an open-source project, and we welcome contributions! 🎉 Here's how you can get involved:

• Fork the repository on GitHub.
• Create a new branch for your feature or fix.
• Commit your changes and submit a pull request.

For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss your ideas.

❓ FAQs

Q: What platforms does Marshal support?
A: Marshal supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can generate binaries for all these platforms.

Q: Is Marshal production-ready?
A: Completely not, as you may have seen it's lacking major features like string concatenation, multiple files compilation, some issues with string because of my shit logic

Q: Can I extend Marshal with custom features?
A: Absolutely! Marshal is designed to be extensible. Feel free to add new syntax or functionality and share your improvements.

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Thank you for exploring Marshal! ❤️

Let’s push this project to its limits together. Happy coding! 🚀✨