Bolt is a new programming language in the making for rapidly building complex web applications. Bolt makes writing applications dead-simple. Eventually, it will also support mobile and desktop platforms.
Bolt has an unique mix of features that allows you to write fully-fledged applications insanely fast, while at the same time guaranteeing that your programs do what they are supposed to do.
- Garbage collected, freeing you from worrying about memory management.
- JSX support, so you write your views in the syntax you're already familiar with.
- Lots of useful features such as match-expressions, tuples, macros, static type checking, automatic type inference, and much more to give you the best development experience.
- Cross-platform standard library, allowing you to write your code for the web platform and the native platform at the same time.
fn fac(n) {
match n {
0 | 1 => 1,
k => k * fac(k-1),
}
}
println!("The faculty of {} is {}", 5, fac(5));
Granted, there are a lot of programming languages, but oddly enough I found myself in the situation where I was still not completely satisfied. For example, Rust is a fantastic programming language, but writing web applications in it feels a little cumbersome due to its manual memory management. On the other hand, functional programming languages like Haskell and Idris look like they come straight out of the future, but sometimes have unpredictable run-time performance and force you to do weird things when all you want to do is mutate a variable. Bolt aims to solve these two issues, while not giving in on performance or correctness.
Bolt was made to make writing user-interfaces dead-simple, while also making sure the resulting code is really fast. You should choose Bolt if you care about correctness, performance and scalability.
- Correctness, because Bolt has a type system that is far superior to
JavaScript's. No more member accesses into
undefinedor other weird error messages. - Performance, because the language has been designed to leave room for a lot of optimisations. The garbage collector is one of the few overheads that the language requires.
- Scalability, because just like Rust, Bolt takes a functional approach to software design using type traits, favouring composition over inheritance.
There's a lot of work that still needs to be done, and we prefer to take our time and make the right decisions from the start rather than having to cope with fundamental design issues later on. Therefore, you'll probably have to wait some time before you can actually preview this software.
You can have a look at the first milestone for more information.
Most definitely! I first want to make sure the design and philosophy is as clear as it can be and that all use-cases have been covered. After that, I will start building the necessary infrastructure for discussing RFCs, helping newcomers out, and hosting libraries. There's a lot to be done, and I'm looking forward to the exciting new input of early adopters of this programmming language. Together we can move mountains!
Rust and Haskell are two of my favorite languages that you'll notice Bolt shares a lot of its syntax and semantics with. Rust is the language that inspired Bolt's syntax, while Haskell helped guide the type checker and standard library design. Traces of other languages can be found, too. The macro system was inspired by Racket's macro system, and the sucesses of garbage-collected languages like Go, JavaScript, Python and Java convinced me that this feature is a must-have.
All in all, Bolt is a mixture of many very different programming languages, and I believe this mixture makes it unique.
Right now, Bolt looks a lot like Rust. I think the developers of the Rust programming language did a great job at creating a language that is both pleasant to read and write and is open to a lot of optimisations. However, Bolt does not come with the advanced borrow checker of the Rust language. It simply isn't needed, because Bolt uses a garbage collector underneath, and hopefully will contain some optimisations in the future that can make your programs as fast as Rust.
Bolt itself is licensed under the GPL-3.0, because I put a lot of work in it and I want the open-source nature of Bolt to be preserved. However, code that is compiled using the Bolt compiler may be licensed under any license you want.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.