Hello World

In this chapter, we try to create a simple BL program printing out "Hello world!" message into the command line.

The Main Function

To start a new project, we simply need to create a file containing the main function used as an application entry point. So let's call our file hello.bl. Every BL executable requires the main function to be present in the program. Every main function is supposed to return s32 (32-bit signed number) as its result state.

The content of hello.bl can look like this:

main :: fn () s32 {
    print("Hello world!\n");
    return 0;
}

Print

Inside the function body, we call print function to print the passed string "Hello world!" into the standard output. The declaration of the print function looks like this:

print :: fn (format: string_view, args: ...) s32 { 
    // ...
}

It's declared inside std/print module and it's available by default. From the declaration you can see it takes format and args as input arguments. The type of the format argument is compiler internal type string_view (representation of any string in the language); args argument type is ... which allows any number of additional values to be passed into the function.

Return

The last statement in the main function body is the return statement. The return statement, as in other languages, terminates the execution of the current function and provides some return value. In our case, it's just a 0.

Compile & Run

To compile our simple program, just type blc hello.bl into the terminal (in the directory containing hello.bl file). The new out.exe executable should be created next to your source file.

This way the BL compiler (called blc) can produce native executable binary for the platform you're running, however, since the BL code can be also interpreted, we can directly execute our program using the same blc command by adding -run parameter before the source file name: blc -run hello.bl. The main function from our example is executed without any native compiled binary creation needed.

The output should look like this:

blc -run hello.bl

Executing 'main' in compile time...
Hello world!
Execution finished with state: 0

Finished in 0.031 seconds.