History • Joshua Thijssen decided on learning more about flex / bison. • “Why not write a language instead of a calculator?” • 2 hours later: 2 developers, a github account and domains registered. • Saffire, dutch/english mix of “saphire” (as in: perl / ruby / ...).
History • Primarily based on PHP / Python syntax with some ideas from other languages (java, ruby, javascript). • We’re 10-15 years behind, but 10-15 years of traps and pitfalls we can avoid.
Technical info • Open source (3-clause BSD license). • Written in C. • Imperative language. • Dynamically and strong typed. • Byte code generation. • Interpreter for now. • JIT (and/or compilation) later.
Selling points • Everything is an object. • Even “foo”, 2, /reg?ex*/ and 3.14159265. • UTF-8 out of the box. • No functions, just objects and methods. • Method and operator overloading.
Current Status • Initial lexing / parsing done. • Language specification on its way. • Still figuring out problems. • Abstract Syntax Trees (AST) can be generated.
What’s next • Finish the language specification. • Bytecode optimization phase (?) • Create the interpreter. • Create a more stable lex / parse system. • ??? • Profit
We need YOU... • C programmers, but many, many others for websites, documentation, language specification, testing/QA, app writers, framework writers, evangelists, etc, etc.. • USERBASE! • If you can read this, you can help us!