• Table of contents
• About Nihil
• Why Nihil?
• Roadmap
• Unicode
• Examples
• Contributors
• References, inspirations

Nihil is a statically- and quantitively-typed functional programming language aimed at producing type- and data-safe lazy programs running without Garbage Collectors.

It is more in a “proof of concept” stage than production-ready, but a prototype will soon appear as there aren't much things left to do. (well there is in terms of difficulty, but not in terms of number)

Nihil came to life after I had an idea: “what if we could control how much resources are used?”

In the beginning, I was willing to make an esoteric language, poorly designed, but functional.

Beginning with some C++, I built my own parser combinators library, an old crappy one, which in the end wasn't working that well, because of some strange things I am still unable to really understand.

@felko introduced me to Haskell, and I wanted to give it a try for many months. That was the perfect time to do so, and so did I restart everything, but this time in Haskell. This led me here, to what I currently have right now, a fully functional basic compiler, mostly written by myself (except the old kind checker, see this pull request).

The ultimate goal is to provide these features:

• Basic features:
  • Anonymous functions
  • User defined operators with custom fixities
  • Pattern matching
  • Data types
  • Type aliases
• Advanced features:
  • Kinds
  • GADTs
  • Equational pattern matching
  • Records
  • Row polymorphism
  • Type classes and instances
  • Quantitive types
  • Modules
  • Polymorphic kinds
• Advanced future features (not in the prototype):
  • Rank N types / forall
  • Type families (type-level functions)
  • Type applications
  • Laziness
  • Dependent types
  • Algebraic effects ?

Nihil natively supports some unicode equivalents to ASCII characters:

Some code examples can be found in the examples folder.

User	What has been done
@felko	Kind checker ; various help about many subjects (parsing, typechecking...) Huge thanks for all the help given.
@mesabloo	Basically everything else

• The Granule project, a statically typed functional programming language with Graded Modal Types
• Pikelet, a dependently typed functional programming language
• GHC, the Great Glasgow Haskell Compiler