Shlang is an interpreted programming language with a static type checker and reference counting. I started this project as part of the 100 Commits challenge organized by DevMentors. The goal of the event was to learn something new while making one commit every day for 100 days. I decided to create a programming language that could be used for the next Advent of Code. Unfortunately, time passed, and I got busy, so I wasn't able to finish it in time.
I started developing Shlang while reading the book Crafting Interpreters. My code is based on it, but I added several features and changes, such as a static type checker, reference counting instead of a garbage collector, break and continue statements, recursion, file importing, and more.
Shlang's syntax is inspired by Rust and Python.
fn main() {
println("Hello world")
}
fn main() {
for i in (1,100) {
if i % 15 == 0 {
println("Fizz Buzz")
}elif i % 5 == 0 {
println("Buzz")
}elif i % 3 == 0 {
println("Fizz")
}else {
println(i)
}
}
}
More examples can be found in the examples and test folders.
Currently, the only way to run Shlang is to compile it from source using Cargo:
git clone https://github.com/GNUSheep/shlang.git
cd shlang
cargo build --release
./target/release/shlangI implemented a SHA-256 benchmark to compare my language against Python and C. The benchmark runs the SHA-256 algorithm 10,000 times on my laptop.
- Specs: AMD Ryzen 3 3250U with 6GB of RAM
As expected, I didn't put much effort into optimizing it. The only optimization I made was using Valgrind to analyze performance bottlenecks and see if any improvements were possible.
I plan to use this language to complete Advent of Code 2025.
There are many features I would like to implement (for example, adding a split function for strings to return a List of Strings). I will continue developing this project in my free time.