ocen

ocen is intended for people who enjoy the do-it-yourself nature of C, and the level of control it gives you - but don't want to deal with the syntactical nuances of C. ocen fundamentally behaves and programs very much like C, but offers some quality-of-life features such as:

• Proper namespaces, modules and import system (say goodbye to header files, and order-dependent definitions)
• Stronger types (almost no implicit casting), and type inference for variables
• Ability to attach methods to structs, enums, builtins
• Rich standard library, with maps, lists, binary IO, image IO, graphics bindings (SDL, GLUT), etc
• Format strings, with JS (`hello {name}`) and Python (f"val = {x:0.3f}") syntaxes supported (but they allocate)
• Better enums: all values are namespaced, can be automatically debug-printed in format strings
• Ability to easily bind C libraries, and to be able to use external functions as methods
• Syntactic sugar for for-each loops, as long as the object has necessary iterator methods
• Automatically generate json for documentation with all definitions in code, and extracted comments
• Relatively small and hackable code-base

ocen transpiles to C, and the only dependency for this compiler is a C compiler on your system (gcc by default, but can be specified with CC environment variable). For now ocen is only tested/supported on linux and macOS, but contributions to help get this running on Windows are welcome if anyone is interested.

Installing

Automated Installation

For the "I don't care, just give me the command" people. This will add some environment variables to your shell config

# Default (installs in ~/ocen):
$ curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ocen-lang/ocen/master/meta/install.sh | bash

# Custom install path:
$ curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ocen-lang/ocen/master/meta/install.sh | BASE=~/local/ bash

Manual Installation

Clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/ocen-lang/ocen.git
$ cd ocen

Use the following command to build the initial compiler:

$ ./meta/bootstrap.sh  # Generates initial compiler
$ ./bootstrap/ocen --help

Compiling other programs

If you wish to use ocen from elsewhere, you can set the OCEN_ROOT environment variable to point to the root directory of this project. This lets the compiler find the standard library and other files it needs to compile your program.

$ export OCEN_ROOT=/path/to/ocen
$ export PATH=$OCEN_ROOT/bootstrap:$PATH # Add the compiler to your PATH

You can then use the compiler as follows:

$ ocen file.oc                # generates ./out and ./out.c
$ ocen file.oc -o ./build/out # generates ./build/out and ./build/out.c
$ ocen file.oc -n -c ./temp.c # generates only ./temp.c

For tips on developing the compiler, see DEVELOPING.md.

Language

You can find various examples of the language in:

• tests: Unit tests for the compiler
• std: The standard library (implementations + C bindings)
• examples: Various examples of the language
• compiler: The compiler itself!