Note
This project was started in January 2017 after I had been annoyed with C++ for a long time, and had not found any good alternatives for my use cases. The current state of the project is that it's functional, but far from truly production-ready. I almost got to the point of releasing the first pre-release version and announcing the project publicly. However, nowadays there are several languages with sufficiently similar design goals, such as Odin, Jai, and Zig. Therefore, this project is no longer being developed.
C* (pronounced "C star") is a C-based hybrid low-level/high-level programming language focused on runtime performance and developer productivity (in this order of priority). The language is simple and unopinionated, supporting imperative, generic, data-oriented, functional, and object-oriented programming.
Learn more about the language at https://emillaine.github.io/cx-language.github.io/.
See code samples under examples.
The project is still in early stages of development: some planned features have not yet been implemented, existing ones are subject to change, and the documentation is scarce.
Contributions are welcome. See the GitHub issues and the Trello board for the project backlog. To ask a question or open a discussion, create an issue or join the C* Discord server.
Compiling C* requires a C++17 compiler, CMake, and LLVM/Clang 20.0.
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Download and extract LLVM/Clang 20.0 pre-built binaries for your platform from https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases, or using a package manager, e.g.
brew install llvm@20. Then run the following commands:mkdir build cd build cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="/path/to/llvm" -
Download and extract LLVM/Clang 20.0 pre-built binaries from https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases. Then run the following commands:
mkdir build cd build cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="C:\path\to\llvm" -DCMAKE_GENERATOR_PLATFORM=x64 -Thost=x64
To run the tests, install lit and its optional dependencies via pip:
sudo python3 -m pip install lit psutil
After this, the following commands can be invoked from the build directory:
cmake --build .builds the project.cmake --build . --target checkruns the test suite.
The C++ code style is enforced by ClangFormat and ClangTidy:
- Run the
formatCMake target to format the code. - Run the
lintCMake target to check if the code is formatted.
C* is licensed under the MIT license, a permissive free software license. See the file LICENSE.txt for the full license text.