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Roadmap

Planned improvements and future directions for Ooga Booga.

Near-term

Array literals

Add first-class array support:

OOF Proposed syntax (not yet implemented)
OOGA items BE [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
SAY items[0]
items[2] GETS 99

For-each loop

A concise iteration syntax over arrays:

OOF Proposed syntax
UGGA EACH item IN items
    SAY item
UGHA

String indexing

Access individual characters:

OOF Proposed syntax
OOGA s BE "hello"
SAY s[0]   OOF "h"

Medium-term

Syntax highlighting

  • VS Code extension with TextMate grammar for .ooga files
  • Pygments lexer for use in documentation code blocks (removes ooga language class requirement from MkDocs)

Playground page

An in-browser playground embedded in the documentation site where visitors can write and run Ooga Booga programs without installing anything.

Implementation options:

  • Compile oogac to WebAssembly and run it client-side
  • Use a server-side evaluation endpoint

Better error recovery

The parser currently stops at the first parse error. Improved error recovery would let the compiler report multiple parse errors per file.

Source maps

Generate Rust source maps or debug annotations so that panic stack traces and error output point back to .ooga line numbers.

Long-term

Native code generation

Add an LLVM or Cranelift backend for compiling to native binaries. This would make Ooga Booga usable in performance-sensitive or embedded contexts.

Standard library

A collection of useful functions shipped with the compiler:

  • String manipulation (split, trim, uppercase, lowercase)
  • Basic math (min, max, abs, pow)
  • Simple I/O helpers

REPL

An interactive read-eval-print loop for quick experimentation:

oogac repl
> SAY "hello"
hello
> OOGA x BE 40 PLUS 2
> SAY x
42

Package system

A mechanism for splitting programs across multiple files and importing functions from other .ooga files.

Contributing

If you want to work on any of these features, open an issue first to discuss the design, then see the Contributing guide.