Nox is a specialized programming language designed to support the implementation of data-oriented design (DOD). Main inspirations are taken from Odin, Rust and Jai. Nox builds upon the different functionalities and concepts of those languages.
- Support for both SoA and AoSoA collections (arrays, dynamic arrays and slices)
- Self-relative pointer with proper copy semantics
- Offset-relative pointer as an alternative to regular pointer arithmetic
- Implicit context system which can be expanded upon
- The concept of allocators as an integral part of the language
- Differentiation between procedures, functions and pure functions
The project contains the following sub-projects:
- nox-boot: Contains the bootstrap compiler written in Odin
- nox-lib: Contains the packages of the standard library
- nox-self: Contains the self-hosted compiler written in Nox
- nox-test: Contains a simpled test-framework written in Nox to validate correct code generation
- nox-vscode: Contains an extension for Visual Studio Code which enables syntax highlighting for Nox
- scripts: Contains necessary build scripts
- vendor: Contains necessary dependencies for the bootstrap and self-hosted compiler
Currently the project differentiates between three versions of the compiler:
- noxb: The bootstrap compiler which got compiled with the Odin compiler
- noxs: The self-hosted compiler which got compiled with the noxb compiler
- noxh: The self-hosted compiler which got compiled with the noxs compiler
The scripts folder contains the follwing build scripts:
- build-noxb: Compiles the noxb compiler
- build-noxs: Compiles the noxs compiler
- build-noxh: Compiles the noxh compiler
The scripts are provided both as a .bat and .sh file to be executed on Windows and Linux respectively.
The build script for the bootstrap compiler (noxb) requires the Odin compiler (version dev-2023-05) to be on the path.
Windows SDK (usually part of Visual Studio) is required to properly link executables.
The Clang compiler and the LLVM project (version 15.x) is required to build all compiler versions. In particular the llvm-config tool must be accessible from the path.