Wirbel - A new programming language

Good Bye!

Due to a lack of time the development of Wirbel has discontinued. We hereby wish to thank all users of Wirbel for their interest and time spent in this project.

Since Wirbel is completely Open Source and available under terms of the GNU GPL, if you want to take over the project and invest into the further development of this project, please let us know.

With best regards,

Mathias Kettner

Introduction

Wirbel is a new programming language. It has a syntax and semantics similar to Python - a very popular language invented by Guido van Rossum. But - unlike Python - Wirbel is a compiler language compiling into native machine code.

This has two great advantages (and several minor ones):

• Wirbel programs execute very fast.
• Compiled Wirbel programs do not need any runtime environment - not even a library.

These two key features make Wirbel a very interesting language in many situations. The lack of the need for a runtime environment does not only save memory but also makes life easier when distributing your software. And speed almost always matters.

Further advantages

• Memory usage: Wirbel uses native C datatypes for numbers, boolean values and the like. No objects are created. This safes lots of memory.
• C/C++ integration: Wirbel code is source and binary compatible with C++. You even can write libraries in Wirbel and use them from C/C++.
• Safer code: Wirbel can detect many programming errors at compile time.
• Language features: Wirbel supports some features Python is missing, such as function overloading.

At the same time most of the features of Python are present in Wirbel either directly or do have a conveniant substitute.

A few limitations of Wirbel

Nothing in the world is without price. Wirbel's scheme of compile time type inference and machine code generation leads to a few limitation in comparison to interpreted languages like Python, Java or PHP:

• Wirbel does not support self inspection out of the box (e.g. ask a variable at runtime wether its type is Integer).
• Wirbel cannot parse Wirbel code at runtime (though that might be implemented indirectly).
• Before the very first start of a Wirbel programm up to a few seconds are needed for compiling.

You have to decide yourself wether these issues are crucial for your projects.

Lacks of the current implementation

Wirbel is brand new. It cannot support you with the same plentitude of libraries Python has - right now. Also it still lacks the possibility of writing classes in Wirbel. That's one of the next things we'll implement. Last but not least the development environment for Wirbel is currently only available for Linux.

Further reading

• Tutorial - A step by step introduction to Wirbel
• Strings - String handling in Wirbel
• Differences to Python - A note for all Python programmers
• Features not found in Python - What you cannot live without
• Type Inference - learn more about Wirbel's type concept
• Download - Get the complete Wirbel delevopment environment
• Copying - Wirbel is available under the terms of the GPL
• The Wirbel Library - an Index of all available library functions