Getting Started

Oxynium is a statically-typed, compiled language. It compiles directly to x86-64 NASM assembly, which is then assembled and linked by GCC to produce a native binary. It targets Linux x86-64 and macOS x86-64.

Installation

You can install Oxynium on any Linux/macOS system by running the following command in your terminal:

curl -sSL https://oxynium.org/scripts/install | bash

Unstable version

You can also install the latest version by passing the latest argument to the installation script.

curl -sSL https://oxynium.org/scripts/install | bash -s -- latest

Requirements

Oxynium requires cargo, rust, nasm, and gcc to be installed on your system.

Upgrade

To upgrade to the latest version, run the installation script again:

curl -sSL https://oxynium.org/scripts/install | bash

Uninstallation

curl -sSL https://oxynium.org/scripts/uninstall | bash

Compiling and running

The compiler binary is oxy. Pass a source file to compile it:

oxy hello.oxy

This produces an executable in the current directory. Run it directly:

./hello

Hello, World

The simplest possible Oxynium program is a single top-level statement:

print("Hello, world!")

Output:

Hello, world!

For larger programs, define a main function:

def main() {
    print("Hello, world!")
}

When main is defined, all executable code must live inside it — top-level statements outside main are a compile error. See Program Structure for details.

Accepting command-line arguments

def main(args: List<Utf8Str>) {
    print(args.len().Str())
    for arg in args {
        print(arg.Str())
    }
}

args includes the binary name as the first element, so a program run with no user arguments has args.len() equal to 1. Utf8Str is the raw OS string type; call .Str() to convert it to the standard Str type before using string operations.

Compilation pipeline

source.oxy
  → Lexer (tokens)
  → Parser (AST)
  → Type Checker
  → Code Generator (NASM assembly)
  → Post-processor
  → NASM assembler
  → GCC linker
  → native binary

Error types

The compiler emits one of the following error kinds: