Types

Compilers have to be fast. Nobody likes to wait around for minutes waiting for their project to compile just to error out after a few seconds. That is where memory optimizations come in. META’s type system tries to achieve a middleground between legibility and performance. There are some built-in primitives and the standard library includes many more advanced types. For simplicity sake META uses the exact same type system as METALS.

Integer

• u8 - 8 bit unsigned integer

• u16 - 16 bit unsigned integer

• u32 - 32 bit unsigned integer

• u64 - 64 bit unsigned integer

• i8 - 8 bit signed integer

• i16 - 16 bit signed integer

• i32 - 32 bit signed integer

• i64 - 64 bit signed integer

Float

• f16 - 16 bit float
• f32 - 32 bit float
• f64 - 64 bit float
• f128 - 128 bit float

Boolean

• bool is a shorthand for u8.

Char

• char - 8 bit unsigned int used to represent ASCII characters
• char[] - Series of characters used to represent primitive strings.

var x: char[2,]; // Character array with 1 reserved byte with the possiblity of expanding indefinitely

var x: char[2,8]; // Character array with 1 reserved byte, may only expand up to 8 bytes.

The char[] type does NOT include any length property by default. Reserving a char[1] will not, as expected, offer space for 1 characters but 0 since char[]s have to be null terminated.

Please note that the stdlib includes an actual String datatype. You can, however, use char[] for fixed length as well as dynamic length character arrays to avoid the 4-byte overhead of strings.

Pointers

Pointers may be declared by using the * syntax.

var i: *char[] = "Hello, World!";

This initializes a pointer to a char[]. This means that i doesn’t contain an explicit value but a pointer to a memory location where the "Hello, World!" char[] resides.

Dereferencing

Any pointer may be dereferenced by specifying an & before the pointer.

var i: *char[] = "Hello, World!";

var h: char = &i;

The type system is meant to automatically figure out what size you want to dereference. For manual control you may specify a cast before the dereferencing operator. Possible values are byte (1 byte), word (2 bytes), dword (4 bytes) and qword (8 bytes)

var i: *char[] = "Hello, World!";

var h: char = (byte) &i;

Structs

META implements struct types which may be used to combine types into a single, new, type.

struct String {
	u32 length
	u32 capacity
	*char[] data 
}

var str: String = { length: 0, capacity: 0, data: "" };