How Coil got here

A small, statically typed scripting language.

I started this as an experiment. I have been taking things apart since I was a kid. Old TVs, mostly. I wanted to see what was inside.

Interpreters were the same itch. I picked up Crafting Interpreters because I wanted to know how one actually runs. I tried it in C. Those attempts did not go well, and I am impatient, so I started learning Rust at the same time as I wrote the next interpreter. That pairing sounds like a bad idea. It was also how this project survived. I am stubborn too. That is how I made myself a programmer in the first place.

I never found a language that fitted me 100%. I liked how easy PHP and JavaScript are to sit down and use, and I did not like how they treat types. I liked Rust’s syntax and its Hindley-Milner type system. Lua I noticed when I moved to Neovim: small, simple, and it still does a lot. Coil is the mix I wanted. Simple to write. Types that hold. A core that stays small.

A lot of time later I had something that mostly worked. Most of the VM is still that foundation. So is the first compiler, and the type checker. I hand-rolled a parser, then switched to chumsky because it made the work possible.

I called it zero-script because I wanted the core small. The name was taken, and it was a mouthful. Coil is better. A coil is a small part. A lot of things tick because of one.

Source files are .hy because henry is the SI unit of inductance. Programs compile to .hyc and run on the VM. Types are Hindley-Milner, so you get checking without a heavyweight toolchain.

It is 0.1.0. You clone it and cargo build. There is no installer yet. This site is new.

That is the state I am starting from.