zhiayang

Flax is a statically and strongly typed general-purpose programming language created as a personal replacement for C++.

It is a low-level, general-purpose language offering pointer and memory manipulation, while having high-level constructs such as automatic reference counting, type and function polymorphism, object-orientation, and compile-time execution.

The result of 5 years of ongoing labour (and several rewrites), Flax currently possesses these features:

• Struct and Class types
• Function overloading
• Parametric types and functions
• First-class functions
• Operator overloading
• Full compile-time execution

[mx] started its life way back in 2011 with a name lost to the depths of time, as an ill-conceived foray into the field of kernel programming. The spirit of that initial leap survives in [mx] as the fifth iteration of the project.

Before abandonment due to instability, it boasted several features that would work intermittently and often mutually exclusive of each other:

• Pre-emptive multitasking
• Executable loading (static linking only)
• Ring-3 userspace with homegrown libc
• Basic self-rolled TCP/IP network stack
• ATA reading over DMA and PIO
• FAT32 read support

Unfortunately, I could never really fix the heisenbugs that kept cropping up, and so development lost its inertia and slowed to a halt by the end of 2016.

[mx] may be picked up again in the future, perhaps as a continuation or as a rewrite — who knows.