Overview
Ovum is a new general-purpose programming language with a design emphasis on safety, purity, and clarity. It is a strongly statically typed, single-threaded language with Kotlin-like syntax and a focus on safety, clarity, and performance.
Design Philosophy
Ovum’s core design principles center around:
- Memory Safety: Automatic memory management through garbage collection eliminates whole classes of bugs like dangling pointers, memory leaks, and buffer overruns.
- Immutability by Default: Variables, object fields, and function parameters are constant by default, reducing unintended side effects and making code easier to reason about.
- Pure Functions: Functions with no side effects whose results can be cached for performance optimization through memoization.
- Interface-Based Polymorphism: No class inheritance; polymorphism achieved through interface implementation and composition, avoiding complex inheritance hierarchies.
- Explicit Unsafe Operations: Low-level or potentially unsafe operations are isolated within explicit
unsafe { ... } blocks.
- Less is More: The language is designed to be simple and easy to learn, with a focus on clarity and readability. The less ways there are to do the same thing, the better.
Key Design Points
- Strong static typing with immutability by default (
var required for mutation).
- Nullable types and Kotlin-style null-handling:
Type?, safe calls ?., Elvis ?:.
- Pure functions (no side effects, VM-level result caching).
-
Classes & interfaces
- No class inheritance; classes only implement interfaces.
- Root
Object is implicit for all classes and interfaces (no need to write : Object). It declares only a virtual destructor.
- Interfaces are named with leading
I (C# style): e.g., IGreeter, IComparable.
- Interface methods are public and virtual by default.
- Class methods implementing interface members must be marked
override.
- Access modifiers are mandatory for all fields and methods in classes (
public/private).
- Fields use
val (immutable) or var (mutable).
- Namespaces with
:: resolution (e.g., sys::Print).
- Functional objects (
call member) for functional programming.
- Type aliases (
typealias keyword) for better readability.
- Built-in operators; no user-defined operators.
- Preprocessor:
#import, #define, #ifdef, #ifndef, #else, #undef.
- Managed runtime: VM with JIT and GC; no manual memory management.
- Single-threaded runtime: no concurrency primitives.
- Passing semantics: all user-defined and non-primitive types (including
String and all arrays) are passed by reference (const by default).
- File extension:
.ovum.