Nik lang

Nik is a high-level, general-purpose language compiled for a register-based virtual machine.

VM

The VM currently executes version 0.1 nikfiles on 64-bit Linux:

• 64 general-purpose registers (r0 is hardwired to zero)
• 8 normalized comparison registers (c0 through c7)
• A bounded 128-word operand stack
• Moving heap allocation for immutable byte strings, U64 arrays, U64 pairs, and traced objects
• Relative conditional and unconditional branches
• Function calls with a bounded 128-frame call stack

The complete file format, instruction encoding, runtime behavior, and validation rules are documented in vm/docs/SPEC.md.

Build and test the VM with:

cd vm
zig build
zig build test

Compiler

The TypeScript bootstrap compiler is in compiler/. It reads Nik source, indexes declarations, resolves lexical names, checks typed HIR, and emits executable .nikb files with typed string values, immutable U64 arrays and pairs, explicit U64-to-string coercion, concatenation, string and Bool equality, and literal/runtime print calls. See compiler/README.md for setup, commands, and current backend limits.

The proposed v0.2 format and language evolution paths are tracked in docs/ROADMAP_0.2.md.

cd compiler
pnpm install
pnpm test
node dist/src/cli.js build ../vm/testdata/hello_source.nik

Run the resulting file with the VM from vm/zig-out/bin/vm.