The first of many…

This is the first in what we hope will be a series of status updates intended to provide the most recent updates surrounding the development of BABLR.

To catch you up on what has happened so far, BABLR started development in 2020 as cst-tokens, intended as a successor to recast. Since then the scope of the project has grown considerably, and it now aims to be a new fully featured IDE, built from the ground up. Its development has also progressed steadily over the last four years, with Conrad (aka conartist6) working on the project full time.

My name is Stirling (aka stirlhoss) and I have been following the project for 2 and half years now. Together Conrad and I founded Silphium Labs with the goal of developing the BABLR technology and use it to bring programming literacy to a majority of the general population. For the past three months I’ve been working part time, but as of tomorrow I will be working full time for Silphium: developing the core BABLR technology, doing community outreach, and building out this website.

Here are some of the major accomplishments we’ve had so far:

• Bootstrapped the BABLR VM: a system for defining LR parsers that are implemented in terms of itself.
• Implemented regex parsing over streaming inputs
• Built an efficient representation for asynchronous input streams

Here is a list of some of the things we’ve accomplished recently:

• Numerous changes and improvements to CSTML, the core markup language that powers BABLR
• Built a prototype of Paneditor, our browser-based drag and drop visual code editor
• Released a new stable version of BABLR
• Released a Deno version of our CLI
• Implemented template tag interpolation rigorously
• Implemented a prototype of the Spamex pattern matching language
• Defined $ flag as a way of defining templates
• Set a tentative date for an alpha release on or around November 18th

Some goals we hope to reach next month include:

• Launch an interactive playground on the website
• Add the ability to use nested (JSON-structured) attributes in CSTML
• Implement drag and drop end to end for the first time in Paneditor

Right now this website is mostly stubbed out pages and layouts, but we are hoping to rapidly expand its content as we race closer and closer to having a production-ready product. Eventually this will be a place you can find tutorials on building grammars, docs on how to make use of all of BABLR’s rich features, and informative blog posts detailing the engineering work that goes into making it all a reality.

If you would like to contribute to the building of the website or any part of BABLR, feel free to hop into our Discord. There is no shortage of work that needs doing and we have tasks at a wide array of skill levels. Any and all help is welcome!