Bolt

Bolt is a new programming language in the making for rapidly building complex applications. It Bolt makes writing web applications dead-simple, and will eventually also support mobile and desktop.

Bolt has an unique mix of features that allows you to write fully-fledged applications insanely fast, while at the same time guaranteeing that your programs do what they are supposed to do.

• Garbage collected, freeing you from worrying about memory management.
• JSX support, so you write your views in the syntax you're already familiar with.
• Lots of useful language features such as match-expressions, tuples, macros, static type checking, automatic type inference, and much more to give you the best development experience.
• Cross-platform standard library, allowing you to write your code for the web platform and the native platform at the same time.

fn fac(n) {
  match n {
    0 => 1,
    _ => fac(n-1),
  }
}

println!("The faculty of {} is {}", 5, fac(5));

FAQ

Why yet another programming language?

Granted, there are a lot of programming languages, but oddly enough I found myself in the situation where I was still not completely satisfied. For example, Rust is a fantastic programming language, but writing web applications in it feels a little counter-intuitive due to its manual memory management. On the other hand, functional programming languages like Haskell and Idris look like they come straight out of the future, but sometimes have unpredictable run-time performance and force you to do weird things when all you want to do is mutate a variable. Bolt aims to solve these two issues, and to be a gate into more complex compilers. Who knows what the successor will look like?

More expressiveness, less boilerplate, and most of all more safety. Bolt is my first attempt at finding it.

Why should I choose Bolt over JavaScript?

Bolt was made to make writing user-interfaces dead-simple, while also making sure the resulting code is really fast. You should choose Bolt if you care about correctness, performance and scalability.

• Correctness, because Bolt has a type system that is far superior to JavaScript's. No more member accesses into undefined or other weird error messages.
• Performance, because the language has been designed to leave room for a lot of optimisations. The garbage collector is one of the few overheads that the language requires.
• Scalability, because just like Rust, Bolt takes a functional approach to software design using type traits, favouring composition over inheritance.

What languages inspired Bolt?

Rust and Haskell are two of my favorite languages that you'll notice Bolt shares a lot of its syntax and semantics with.

What's the difference between Bolt and Rust?

I really like Rust, but if I just care about writing an application I believe Rust's memory model with its borrow checker is overkill. Having a garbage collector might result in a performance penalty, but I believe that as long as the user does not notice it, it does not really matter.

License

Bolt itself is licensed under the GPL-3.0, because I put a lot of work in it and I want the open-source nature of Bolt to be preserved. However, code that is compiled using the Bolt compiler may be licensed under any license you want.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.