Rix Language

Rix is an expressive and efficient language for the C ecosystem. Rix uses C libraries natively and generates easy to understand C code.

There are five core principles behind Rix:

1. Ease of programming, inspired by Python
2. Fast, like C code
3. Type safety, like Scala
4. Ability to go lower level and write C code
5. No reserved keywords, everything is redefinable

We ran the prime counting benchmark for Rix, C and Python. Here's what we got:

Measure	Rix	C	Python
Runtime (ms)	457	424	7836
Characters of code	413	542	474

The best way to introduce yourself to this language is to take a look at some of the examples and try running them. Rix is still in early development; many features have not yet been fully implemented or described. A list of major development tasks remaining can be found in the wiki.

Features

• Rix uses type inferencing, so the boilerplate Java statement:

Point point = new Point (x,y)

becomes a short Rix statement:

#point = Point (x, y)

New identifiers have are marked as new with "#", and Rix will infer their type for you. Their types cannot be changed once set. In the above example, point gets category Point.

• Rix provides exception-safe resource management using Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII), so you don't have to worry about memory leaks and unclosed file handles.

• Rix tries to follow English linguistic constructs wherever possible and practical, so, most of Rix language expressions take the form:

  Subject Verb Object

  The following statements:

hello = "Hello"
helloWorld.add(hello)

parse as:

Subject	Verb	Object
hello	=	"Hello"
myset	add	hello

Subjects and objects are collectively known as nouns, and are analogous to object (instances of a class) in object-oriented programming.

Methods and function are called verbs in ritchie. For example:

factorial -> int (int n)
	#result = 1
	#i.for (1,n+1)
		result = result * i
	-> result

print (factorial (5))

You can also write succinct one liner verbs like the one below which gives the nth Fibonacci number:

fib -> int(int n) = (n <= 1).tf (n, fib(n-1) + fib(n-2))

print (fib(5))

There's no assignment operator in Rix, but = is defined as an assignment verb for Identifier.

• A special category of verb is a control flow verb.

if, while and for in Rix are all such verbs. They are not keywords, as you can redefine them, although this is probably not a good idea.

• Rix has no keywords. All operators in Rix can be overloaded.

• Rix is whitespace sensitive

Get started

1. Build the rix compiler make clean;make
2. Write your rix program in your favourite text editor (let's call it program.rit)
3. Set RIX_HOME export RIX_HOME=/path/to/rix
4. Run ${RIX_HOME}/rix.sh program.rit and rix will build, execute and run the program

Team

Rix Language is being developed by a group of efficiency obsessed programmers for demanding programmers who want both the conciseness of Python and the efficiency of C.

Concept: Rohana Rezel (Riolet Corporation)

Design and implementation: Joe Pelz, Phillip Hood and Dimitry Rakhlei (final year students at BCIT, Burnaby, BC, Canada)