✨ Yellow hello hack club! I’m *VERY* excited to be shipping what is almost certainly my biggest project to date (also the fastest implemented: I wrote pretty much the whole thing throughout the day yesterday): Idyllic, the fastest way to build REST APIs!
:githubparrot: Github (⭐ s always appreciated) z.rishi.cx/g/idyllic & z.rishi.cx/g/idyllic-todo (for an example of what a real-world API might look like)
🚀 At its core, Idyllic is a programming language that allows you to define how data flows through a given API & its routes:
define middleware { test, logger } from "./api"
define guards { authed } from "./api"
define handlers { getAllTodos, postTodos } from "./api"
global
| middleware logger
fragment getTodosFragment(level)
| guard authed(level)
| middleware test
route "/todos" {
| middleware test
get {
| expand getTodosFragment("user")
getAll
}
post {
| expand getTodosFragment("admin")
postTodos
}
}
🛠️ The Idyllic language reverses the conventional paradigm that surrounds Node REST APIs: usually, you have to write your functions _for a framework_. With Idyllic, you can assemble your API completely independently of your functions themselves—now, an API is simply a wrapper over regular old Typescript functions! The language itself comes with a pretty big suite of features (you can read more about them at the Github page):
• Static typing with Typescript & definition types
• Parameterized, first-class macro support with Fragments
• Data pipelines with Sequences
• First-class support for Middleware and Guards
• Query parameter capturing
• Request type definitions
🕸️ The repository also comes with a minimal HTTP server that takes in a compiled Idyll and starts up a fully-functioning API from it:
import { IdyllicCompiler } from "@idyllic/compiler";
import { IdyllicServer } from "@idyllic/server";
(async () => {
// The fromFile static method reads the file into a string for us
const compiler = await IdyllicCompiler.fromFile("ast.idl")
// The compile method executes all 5 stages of compilation automatically.
const compiled = await compiler.compile()
// The server constructor takes in a compiled Idyllic object.
const server = new IdyllicServer(compiled)
// The start function takes in a port number (defaults to 3000) and a function to be executed on start.
server.start(3000, () => {
console.log("Idyllic server has started!")
})
})()
💨 This server implementation’s pretty fast, too: in most cases, it comes close to (and in some cases, beats) Express! It’s derived directly from node’s built-in http
module.
Idyllic’s been a project that I’ve dreamt of making for quite a while now, and I’m super happy with how it turned out! I’ve included a little walkthrough of an Idyllic project down below :) I can’t wait to see what you’ll build with it!
Special thanks to @JackyZhao @matthewgleich @safin.singh for being awesome along the way ✨