The Iron Programming Language

Iron is a programming language for building secure and scalable systems. This repository contains the source code for the Iron compiler, which is currently implemented as a collection of Rust crates.

Iron is not production-ready by any means, but is actively being built in the open. I welcome anyone interested in shaping its future.

Hello, world!

Iron takes inspiration from Rust, as well as other modern languages including Go, Swift, and TypeScript. Below is an example "hello world" program.

import "io"

// Represents a color.
type RGB (U8, U8, U8)

// Represents a person.
type Person {
	name          String
	favoriteColor RGB?
}

implement Person {
	// Returns a string introducing the `Person`.
	introduce(self Self) String {
		"Hi, my name is ${self.name}!"
	}
}

function main() {
	let name = "Sam"
	let favoriteColor = (0, 122, 255)
	let author = Person{name, favoriteColor}

	io.print(line: author.introduce())
}

Iron aims to maintain a small conceptual surface area. This is reinforced with other language decisions that get out of your way and guide you toward code that "just works."