Welcome to Snax: A Journey into Low-Level Programming

A Cat Who Loves Snax

Introduction:

Snax is a small, statically typed, low-level programming language that compiles to WebAssembly. The main purpose of Snax is to explore low-level programming concepts without having to leave the warm glow of your web browser. Snax is a hobby project, and is still in its infancy. However, it's evolving rapidly, and is already capable of performing complex computations in the browser.

But first, a hello world program:

Click "Run" to compile and run the code right in your browser!

Motivation:

I really like programming, but I have no formal CS education beyond AP computer science. As a result, certain low-level concepts have always been a bit of a mystery to me. Things like operating systems, assembly language, and memory management felt like black magic compared to writing web and mobile apps in high-level languages like python, php, and javascript.

Then I learned rust. Wow! So Cool! But alas it still takes care of so much stuff for you. I wanted to learn how these things worked under the hood. So I decided to write my own programming language. x86 assembly is... a lot, and llvm is... a lot. So I figured I'd stick with what I know and write a compiler in TypeScript with web assembly as the target.

Why Web Assembly?

  • Multiplatform: Web assembly runs in the browser, on the server, and on the desktop and I don't have to worry about AMD vs Intel chips or anything like that.
  • Low-Level: Web assembly is still pretty darn low level, providing you with ints, floats, raw linear memory and a stack based machine language, but not so low level that I have to care about the number of registers supported by your CPU.
  • Simplicity: It's a pretty small instruction set (compared to x86) and represents a perfect bridge between high-level languages and machine code.

Features:

Snax covers most of the basics you'd expect from a low-level, C-like language:

  • functions
  • control flow: loops and conditional branching
  • basic data types: its, floats, strings, booleans
  • compound data types: structs and arrays
  • static type checking
  • heap memory allocation

Unlike some of those old school languages, snax also has some modern features:

  • first class support for exposing functions to javascript
  • a module system
  • type inference

Applications:

Snax shines when tasked with simple compute-intensive operations that need to run in a web browser. A prime example is this web-based program that renders intricate clifford attractors. Rendering clifford attractors requires compute that can't be parallelized and requires a lot of iterations. It's the perfect use case for snax!

Learning Snax:

Good luck reading these docs! They are under active development. There are certainly numerous compiler bugs and unfinished language features. But here's the github repository so knock yourself out. This is a labor of love and a hobby project. I'm not trying to build the next big thing, I'm just trying to learn and have fun. If you want to learn with me, I'd love to have you along for the ride!