Versions

At the moment, Johann is building up from "nothing" towards "complete". There's a lot of kludge in the syntax and a host of random restrictions, all in service of "anything is better than writing assembly." As the compiler gains power, the language will gel, hopefully ending up somewhere graceful. Right now, there only two constraints:

The current release can compile the development sources.
The development sources can compile themselves.

This provides a backwards compatibility guarantee for a single release. Skipping a release may break things. For example, upgrading to v0.20250610 introduced == and deprecated =. Support wasn't removed until the following release.

Release History

`v0.20250622`

Use structs a couple places, fix an assignment ordering bug.

`v0.20250620`

Add struct declarations, and support variable declarations of struct types. A new . operator provides access to members of a pointed-to struct for both reading and writing.

`v0.20250613`

Add ArrayList and TreeMap ADTs to the library. Remove support for = and ! as comparison operators. Parse full programs, not just expressions.

`v0.20250610`

Support == and != in favor of their kludge counterparts = and !. Support >= and <= as well. Use "best fit" memory recycling, instead of "lowest address". Add actual docs, not a 20-page README.md.

`v0.20250607`

Support compound expressions with a proper parser; statements and declarations are parsed, but still emitted from the token stream.

`v0.20250606`

jnc is entirely Johann, and memory error reporting is further improved.

`v0.20250530`

Add StringBuilder to the library, convert more of jnc to Johann, and support function pointers (via declarations).

`v0.20250526`

Fix globals to use their declared width. Improve reporting of memory errors.

`v0.20250525`

Recycle freed memory, and get more from the OS as needed. Introduce pub to make symbols available to other compilation units.

`v0.20250524`

First parts of jnc and jstdlib.o written in Johann. Support void returns, hex literals, and taking an address.

`v0.20250522`

Support for writing to global variables, not just reading them.

`v0.20250518`

Lex numbers directly, use printf for emitting, add symbol tracking and extremely primitive register allocation so programs can use symbolic names, rather than just a-h. Still constrained to eight local vars per function.

`v0.20250510`

Add IO functions - including printf - and some character recognition functions. Buffer STDIN & STDOUT. A simple linear-scan map/table/dict.

`v0.20250426`

Add void as a type (for pointers), as well as done/again loop control keywords.

`v0.20250420`

Direct translation to assembly, and direct mapping of single-character variable names to registers (variable a goes in x20, b goes in x21, etc.). Memory is fixed-size and allocate-only, never freed. Sufficient to solve Not Quite Lisp.