C3 Language

C3 is a C-like language trying to be "an incremental improvement over C" rather than a whole new language. C3 owes a lot to the ideas of the C2 language: to iterate on top of C without trying to be a whole new language.

C3 tries to be an alternative in the the C/C++ niche: fast and close to the metal.

Design Principles

• Procedural "get things done"-type of language.
• Try to stay close to C - only change where truly needed.
• C ABI compatibility and C C integration.
• Learning C3 should be easy for a C programmer.
• Dare violating the "close to metal" principle if the value is great.
• Data is inert.
• Avoid "big ideas".
• Avoid the kitchen sink language trap.

Current status

It's possible to try out the current C3 compiler in the browser: https://ide.judge0.com/?1EFo – this is courtesy of the developer of Judge0.

Design work is still being done in the design draft here: https://c3lang.github.io/c3docs/. If you have suggestions, send a mail to christoffer@aegik.com, file an issue or discuss C3 on the r/ProgrammingLanguages Discord server: https://discord.gg/cfu4wdk

There are some small work being done on the parser here, but most of the structure is still missing:

What's missing in the parser

• asm sections.
• bitstructs
• array range initializers e.g. { [1..2] = 2 }
• assert/$assert as keywords
• Docs not linked to statements/functions/declarations.

What's missing in the semantic analyser

• Incomplete handling of imports.
• Function signatures incomplete.
• Function typedef not done.
• asm not done.
• generic not analysed.
• $switch and $for not handled.
• Enums not correctly handled.
• Type resolution not complete for all types.
• Macro call not handled completely.

What's missing overall

• Improved integration with C.
• Generic macros.
• Update of error system
• Imports aren't quite stable
• Strings, vararrays aren't finalized
• Stdlib not started
• More tests and support for multi file tests.

What's working?

• Lexing and parsing works with some minor exceptions
• Normal code works
• You can use any C function by declaring it as a normal C3 function with external

(For more details see missing.txt)

If you wish to contribute with ideas, please file issues on the c3docs: https://github.com/c3lang/c3docs instead of the compiler.