More about Ikko

Getting Ikko

You can find the source code on github.

To build Ikko, you will need Haskell Stack installed. From there, you can run make inside the repository.

To run an example, run a command like stack exec ikko -- examples/fib.ik .

Goals

Some new languages bring exciting new ideas to the table. This is not one of those. The goal of Ikko is to maximize the ROI on novelty, and to be the best language possible using only techniques and features that are reasonably well established.

Ikko comes from my frustration with other programming languages. I found that I was often thinking, "this language would be so much better if it just had X from language Y." There was no single langauge that, to me, felt like it had quite the right mix.

I like Haskell's type system, but the language is clunky to work in day-to-day. Rust has a similarly good type system, but I want a garbage collector (I don't do systems programming) and better support for immutability. I like the light syntax and fluid tooling of Go, but it forces you to write endless boilerplate to do anything modestly clever.