The Orbit Programming Language

Frontend

This project builds a Swift framework that handles lexical & semantic processing of Orbit source files.

Lexer

The lexer is responsible for breaking a source file up into a set of tokens that the parser can use.

For example, the following Orbit code:

abc = 123

would be broken down into the tokens:

1. Identifier("abc")
2. Assignment("=")
3. IntLiteral("123")

Parser

Using the tokens provided by the lexer, the parser attempts to conbine then into meaningful, legal statements/expressions. The previous example would be parsed into an AssignmentExpression, with a left branch of type IdentifierExpression and a right branch of type IntLiteralExpression.

The end result of a parsing pass is an Abstract Syntax Tree. This tree is basis of all further compilation phases.

Usage

This library is part of Orbit's bootstrap system and is designed to be comsumed by the Orbit command line tool. This code will eventually be rewritten in Orbit itself and may become redundant.

However, the library could easily be embedded in other tools (written in Swift/ObjC) to provide lexical/semantic information about Orbit source code, for instance, in an IDE.

Building

The library uses the Swift Package Manager and should build on any platform where Swift is supported.

git clone https://github.com/daviejaneway/OrbitFrontend.git
cd OrbitFrontend
swift build

To run the test suite:

swift test

To use OrbitFrontend in another Swift project, just add the following line to your Pacakge.swift dependencies:

.Package(url: "https://github.com/daviejaneway/OrbitFrontend.git", majorVersion: 0)