Azikalao: Let's make Objective-C pretty

Azikalao is a new programming language that tries to fix the Objective-C ugliness with a ruby-like syntax.

Read this blog post about why we need this.

Sample code

The current implementation is a preprocessor: translates from Azikalao to Objective-C. Given the following Azikalao source code sample01.az:

# sample code for azikalao
require <Foundation/Foundation.h>
require "MyOtherClass.h"

class Foo
end

class Bar < NSObject
    def init > id
    end
    
    def something
    end
end

And running the following command:

$ azikalao sample01.az

The compiler will generate two files: first, the header file sample01.h:

// sample code for azikalao
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import "MyOtherClass.h"

@interface Foo
@end

@interface Bar : NSObject
- (id) init;
    
- (void) something;
@end

And second, the source file sample01.m:

#import "sample01.h"
// sample code for azikalao

@implementation Foo
@end

@implementation Bar
- (id) init {}
    
- (void) something {}
@end

Now you can compile this natively with something like this:

$ clang -o sample01.o sample01.m

Requirements

Everything is developed on a OS X Lion system. If you want to try it on Linux or other systems, you will have to collect and build all the pieces.

Current requirements are:

• clang compiler from LLVM
• an Objective-C runtime
• Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) support

Please tell me if you got it running in Linux, thanks!

What's next

This project is alpha software, everything is really unstable and not production ready. Particularly the language specification is not stable right now.

I would love to incorporate this to LLVM, so we could make amazing stuff and use this thing for real (Hello, Apple?).

My first goal is to make the language self-hosted, that means it should compile itself. When that happens, I will release the 0.1 version to the world.