Cylium

Imperative, strongly typed scripting language

Website | Getting started | Docs

What is Cylium?

Cylium is a minimalistic programming language focused on clarity and control.
It combines the efficiency of low-level languages such as C and Rust
with a clean, easy-to-learn syntax.

The language emphasizes simplicity while still offering precise control over memory.
Explicit memory management is available when needed, without unnecessary boilerplate.

• Clear and minimal design — clean, expressive syntax focused on readability and control

• Low-level efficiency — inspired by the performance and control of C and Rust

• Flexible usage — suitable for scripting, tooling, and systems-level development

Example:

proc main
   # read input from user
   var name = input

   # printing on stdout
   echo "Hello, " + name + "!"

   # exit the program 
   exit 0
end

Read More

This is the official and primary repository of the Cylium programming language.
It includes the full interpreter source code and all development-related resources.
Documentation and tutorials are available on the official website.

Performance

The chart above compares the execution time required to compute the first one million Fibonacci numbers using different programming languages.

Language	Time (ms)	About
C++	~3	Represents highly optimized compiled native performance
Cylium	~366	Runs through an interpreter but still maintains relatively strong performance
Lua	~100	A well-known lightweight scripting language used in embedded systems and games
Python	~15628	A general-purpose interpreted language with relatively high runtime overhead

The benchmark demonstrates the performance characteristics of Cylium compared to both low-level and high-level languages.

Despite being an interpreted language, Cylium significantly outperforms Python in this benchmark and remains within a reasonable distance of other lightweight scripting environments.

Benchmark was run on an 8-core 2.8 GHz processor
All benchmark implementations are available in the benchmarks/ directory.
The bench.sh script compiles and runs each implementation and reports the average execution time across 5 runs.
The benchmark is intended to provide a rough performance comparison, not a definitive measurement.

Compilation from Source

You can compile the latest version of Cylium from source by following the steps below.
(Precompiled binaries for stable releases are also available for download here).
(Unless you know what are you doing, it is better to use stable release).

1. Install Rust
   Follow the instructions at https://rustup.rs to install Rust and Cargo.

2. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/ztry8/cylium.git
   cd cylium/interpreter
   

3. Build the release version

   cargo build --release
   

After building, the compiled binary will be available in target/release/

Contributing

License

TODO