Zen

Zen is a performance-oriented imperative scripting language that compiles to human-readable C99. Unlike most new languages, Zen is focused on providing an easy front-end scripting language for game engines.

Design Goals

• Compiled
• Minimal runtime (in C)
• No GC or reference counting overhead
• Incremental compilation
• Prefer verbosity over conciseness when it aides clarity or readability
• Created to play nice with IDE-based workflows
  • Compiler as a service
  • Fast autocomplete results
  • Fast and trustworthy refactorability
• Good debuggability
  • A VM that provides runtime hot-reloading including data layout changes
  • Integrates nicely with VSCode

Hello World

using System;

namespace Program;

public fun void Main()
{
    Console::WriteLine("Hello from Zen!");
}

Motivation

Zen attempts to be "nice to look at" by my subjective standards. I take aesthetics pretty seriously, and when I can feel "zen" looking at my code, it makes me happy and thus, more productive.

Zen is NOT a systems language. As in, it shouldn't be used outside game scripting for simple video games.

Features/Design Decisions

Everything Is Explicitly Defined

Unlike most other C-like languages, in Zen, every variable must have either a var or let keyword in front of it to signify if the value will change or not.

let int one = 1; // This variable is immutable and cannot be changed.
var int two = 2; // This variable is mutable and can be changed.

Attempting to modify an immutable variable will result in a compiler error.

Access Modifiers

All identifier definitions must have an accessor defined. Zen will not assume either one by default, you have to specify.

public struct Vector2
{
    public var float x;
    public var float y;

    public self(let float x, let float y)
    {
        self.x = x;
        self.y = y;
    }
}

private fun int twenty()
{
    return 20;
}

Memory management

Zen strongly discourages writing dynamic allocations in game logic.