Nit is an expressive language with a script-like syntax, a friendly type-system and aims at elegance, simplicity and intuitiveness.

Nit has a simple straightforward style and can usually be picked up quickly, particularly by anyone who has programmed before. While object-oriented, it allows procedural styles.

The Nit Compiler (nitc) produces efficient machine language binaries.

Some Nit features:

• Pure Object-Oriented.
• Multiple Inheritance.
• Realist typing policy.
• Light and clear syntax.

Requirements:

• gcc http://gcc.gnu.org/ (or a compatible C compiler)
• pkg-config http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config/
• ccache http://ccache.samba.org/ to improve recompilation
• libgc-dev http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/
• graphviz http://www.graphviz.org/ to enable graphs with the nitdoc tool
• libunwind http://nongnu.org/libunwind

Those are available in most Linux distributions

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential ccache libgc-dev graphviz libunwind-dev pkg-config

and on OS X using brew

$ brew install ccache bdw-gc graphviz libunwind-headers pkgconfig

or with MacPorts

$ sudo port install ccache boehmgc graphviz libunwind-headers pkgconfig

Important files and directories:

• benchmarks/ Script to bench the compilers
• bin/ The Nit tools
• c_src/ C code of nitc (needed to bootstrap)
• clib/ C code needed by nitc to compile programs
• contrib/ Various Nit programs (may or may not be useful)
• doc/ Documentation
• examples/ Program examples written in Nit
• lib/ Nit standard library
• LICENCE License of the software
• Makefile Bootstrap the Nit tools
• misc/ Some additional files for commons text editors and tools
• NOTICE.md List of the authors
• README This file
• share/ Common resources used by tools
• src/ The Nit tool sources (written in Nit)
• tests/ Non-regression test-suite

How to start:

$ make
$ bin/nitc examples/hello_world.nit
$ ./hello_world

You can source misc/nit_env.sh to setup your environment like PATH, MANPATH and bash completion. To have your environment automatically configured at login, just source it with install as argument.

$ . misc/nit_env.sh install

Information, contacts and help:

• Website http://www.nitlanguage.org
• Issues https://github.com/nitlang/nit/issues
• Chatroom https://gitter.im/nitlang/nit