Essence
A programming language, with a focus on essential language features and simplicity.
Project maintained by alexandertrefz Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham
Goals
The main goal for Essence is to allow the authoring of bug-free maintainable code, in a fast and pleasant manner. Essence features a strong type system combined with a mixture of functional and object oriented concepts, enabling code that is easy to understand & maintain.
Its syntax and features are designed with modern IDE’s in mind, allowing for great code completion & inline documentation features.
Essence compiles to modern ECMAScript, allowing execution in Bun, Node.js as well as browsers.
The Essence
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Extensibility is better than completeness.
- Creating correct code must be enjoyable.
- Prototyping must be fast – thus refactoring must be painless.
- Readability counts.
- There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it.
- Practicality beats purity.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Clever is seldom good.
Features
- All Data is Immutable
- Static Structural Typing
- Type Inference
- Compact & Readable Syntax
- Algebraic Data Types
- Modules
- Interfaces
- Generics
- Named Parameters
- Arbitrary Precision Numbers
- First-Class Functions
Example Code
You can find the most recent and working example of syntax in the HelloWorld.es as well as the other files in testFiles. It also should be noted that the syntax is meant to be viewed with a font with code ligatures, like FiraCode.
You can compile the testFiles with the esc executable in bin (after compiling the grammar with bun compile-grammar). This will create a .js file with the same name in the same directory. These files can be executed via Bun, node or in a browser.
The current runtime implementation is rudimentary however. There are many features missing from the standard library. Various langauge features are only partially implemented.
Disclaimer
This language is still a work in progress. It is not ready for use yet and there is no documentation as most things are in flux. Generally: Here be dragons!