MinimIDE

A lightweight, fast, and powerful IDE that aims to introduce beginners to Minima: a simple, easy-to-understand, object-oriented programming language designed with ease-of-use and performance in mind.

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Inspiration

Minima is an a lightweight, powerful, and dynamic object oriented language that provides a powerful alternative to often slower, traditional scripting languages. However, Minima lacked a meaningful integrated development environment(IDE), which is a critical gap and MinimIDE aims to address that.

What it does

MinimIDE aims to introduce the Minima programming language to those who have little to no experience with programming. With a clear user-interface, effective syntax highlighting, and smart code-refracturing, MinimIDE puts you well on your way

How we built it

MinimIDE, unlike Minima is written in C#, and Microsoft .NET's Windows Forms to support an object-oriented syntax model and a powerful user-interface. Minima is written in C, because it aims to be lightweight and fast. Because MinimIDE's core functionalities revolve around user-interfaces and syntactical analysis - speed was not a pressing demand.

Challenges we ran into

While Minima's syntax is not as complex or far reaching as C# or Java, it was nevertheless a challenge to implement the entirety of Minima's syntax as an object-based syntax-tree. Another challenge faced during the development process was that brute-force syntax highlighting took way too long. Instead MinimIDE compares the current syntax-tree to the previous syntax-tree, and only highlights the differences.

What's next for MinimIDE

MinimIDE's object-oriented syntax model provides a powerful platform for more advanced features such as static analysis, and some forms of preliminary type-checking. MinimIDE also aims to support plugins written in Minima, in the near future.

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