Butterfly

Butterfly is an experimental programming language with an event-driven perspective to create concurrent programs by default. The Butterfly language is based on modules that communicate exclusively through events and asynchronous message passing.

You can find some commented code examples to know more about the language reading this doc

Butterfly image by me, Hilson-Alex

Getting Started

By following these instructions you will get the working compiler on your computer.

Installing

The easiest way to install the compiler, you just need to download the latest version of the bf_installer.msi here. When executed, the installer will install the executable, dependencies and do all setup needed.

Another way to get the compiler working is downloading the source code, adding the path to the [/out] folder(./out) on the Path environment variable an then compile the source code with the -o ./out/butterfly.exe flag. It is important to not change the locations of the executable or the resource folder (and anything inside it), or the compiler may malfunction.

You can see a tutorial about configuring the environment variables here.

Using The Compiler

The Butterfly compiler receive a directory with one or more .bf files inside. You can read the specification of the Butterfly Language Grammar here

If you used the installer or added the /out folder to the Path environment variable, then you can just use it like this:

butterfly <flags> <folder_with_bf_files>

Or, alternatively, you can just specify the path to the executable as follows:

path\to\butterfly.exe <flags> <folder_with_bf_files>

As said before, it's important to keep the compiler together side-by-side with the resources folder Otherwise it will break.

All flags are optional. The valid flags are listed bellow.

• -help: prints the usage and all valid flags
• -out: specify the path and the name where the executable will be generated.
• -runtime: changes which runtime will be embedded to the executable.
• -listTokens: list all valid tokens. You also can read them here. This is useful to understand the parser errors.
• -lexerVerbose: Prints the parsed tokens while compiling. Used on debugging.
• -keepGeneratedFiles: Keep the generated files after compiling. Used ONLY for debugging.

Cloning and Building

To get the repository running locally on your machine you will need to install the Go compiler

You can clone the project by running

git clone --recursive git@github.com:Hilson-Alex/Butterfly.git

or, if you can't use ssh

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Hilson-Alex/Butterfly.git

Next, open the project folder and run

go generate ./src
go build -o ../out/butterfly.exe github.com/Hilson-Alex/Butterfly/src

And then you will have a butterfly.exe on the out folder, beside the src.

You can setup the Path environment variable as instructed above if wanted

Author

• Hilson A. W. Junior - Initial work

License

This project is under the BSD 3-Clause License - for more info read the LICENSE file