Getting started with SuperC

Hi everyone! Welcome to SuperC documentation.

⚠️ Status: The compiler is still experimental, and the language is not finalized yet. Expect bugs, missing features, and breaking changes.

Who are you?

If you landed here, you probably are one of the following…

What is SuperC

SuperC is a C superset language, fully backwards compatible with C, but with modern language ergonomics.

Overall, SuperC is a compelling effort to bring the old, reliable C to the modern world, inspired by Go, Rust and Zig.

1. 1972 - C gives you a pistol, very useful, but makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
2. 1997 - C++ makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.
3. 2026 - SuperC gives you a pistol with silencer, laser pointer, and better magazine. Why would you shoot yourself in the foot? Just learn to use a pistol!

Vision

• SuperC attempts to be a C successor, improving modern features and zero-cost overhead.
• Slightly unify C under the same sun.
  • Source code for the same program can produce errors in different compilers even for the same platform, C actually refers to C dialects depending on which compiler, platform and architecture you are targeting.
  • Since SuperC is going to be multiplatform and multiarch, no need for another compiler should arise, then keeping dialects of SuperC out of scope.
  • The goal is to collect all the best features from all the C dialects into SuperC and document the most possible edge cases and undefined behaviour, for if another SuperC compiler is ever created, prevent it from being a dialect.
• Reduce the learning curve of C to a minimum for everyone.
  • Right now, most people blindly reject C not because it’s complicated, but because it’s usually poorly taught.
  • The goal is to enhance this documentation to make SuperC easy to learn as a beginner, learning C in the process.
• Easy integration with existing technology, since SuperC is backwards compatible with C, there is no need of creating wrappers for existing libraries, for example SDL2.
  • You can choose to create a wrapper to easily use a library in SuperC, but also you can choose not to.

Roadmap

• Documentation
  • Keep documentation up-to-date.
  • Provide dual-track explanations: by-the-hand guides for beginners, and straight forward documentation for experienced developers.
  • Use examples (at least the following): simple usage, real usage, and edge cases.
• Compiler
  1. Complete LLVM backend
     • Right now, the backend is experimental x86_64 specific, unoptimized assembly. Just meant to showcase the new language features.
  2. Complete C11 and C23 syntax
  3. Complete new language features:
     • Struct inheritance/composition
     • defer auto
     • Lambdas
     • (?) Namespaces
     • (?) HolyC “sub_switch”
     • (?) Switch goto in-switch labels.
  4. Better error messages, help, and man pages.
  5. Multiplatform support (write similar code in Linux, Windows and MacOS, etc)
     • Allow the same (safe) SuperC code to compile and run across platforms without much modification.
     • The goal is to reduce the heavy regions guarded by #ifdef macros when working with cross-platform code (for Windows mostly).
• Standard library
  • #include <superc.h>
  • Strings
  • Arrays
  • Try/catch
  • Date
  • …
• Multithreading
  • Similar to goroutines, SuperC must support lightweight threads for massive concurrency, easy to use and manage resources.
  • This implies new syntax.
  • And library functions.
• Tooling & Editor Extensions
  1. A language cannot survive today without first-class tooling. Developing a highly responsive VSCode extension powered by a robust Language Server Protocol (LSP) is a top priority.
  2. Other editors are welcome as well (Neovim, Emacs, JetBrains, …).

Source code

You are welcome to contribute.

https://github.com/bruneo32/superc