Hello World

Welcome to Helix! It’s traditional when learning a new language to write a program that prints “Hello, World!” to the screen. We’ll follow this tradition here.

Writing and Running a Helix Program

First, create a new directory for your Helix project. Ideally in ~/projects/hello_world Next, create a new source file and call it main.hlx. Helix files use the .hlx extension. If you’re using more than one word in your filename, use an underscore to separate them (e.g., hello_world.hlx).

Open the main.hlx file you just created and enter the following code:

fn main() {
    print("Hello, World!");
}

Compiling and Running the Program

Save the file and return to your terminal in the ~/projects/hello_world directory. To compile your Helix program, run:

helix main.hlx

This command tells the Helix compiler to compile main.hlx and output an executable named hello_world.

To run your compiled program, use the following command:

Windows
Unix

.\main.exe

./main

You should see the output:

Hello, World!

Congratulations! You’ve written and run your first Helix program. You’re officially a Helix programmer—welcome!

Writing a Helix Program Without a Main Function

Helix provides a feature that allows you to write programs without explicitly defining a main function, similar to scripting languages like Python. This is done using the #[no-entry] attribute.

Create a new file called hello_no_entry.hlx and enter the following code:

#[no-entry]

print("Hello, World!");

This code does not include an explicit main function. The #[no-entry] attribute allows the compiler to automatically determine what needs to go into the main function. However, using #[no-entry] can cause undefined behavior, so it is not recommended for complex programs.

Compiling and Running the No-Entry Program

To compile this Helix program, run:

helix hello_no_entry.hlx

To run the compiled program, use the following command:

Windows
Unix

.\hello_no_entry.exe

./hello_no_entry

You should see the output:

Hello, World!

Anatomy of a Helix Program

Let’s review the “Hello, World!” program in detail:

The Main Function

fn main() {
}

These lines define a function named main. The main function is special: it is always the first code that runs in every executable Helix program. Here, the first line declares a function named main that has no parameters and returns nothing. If there were parameters, they would go inside the parentheses ().

The function body is wrapped in {}. Helix requires curly brackets around all function bodies. It’s good style to place the opening curly bracket on the same line as the function declaration, with one space in between.

The Print Statement

print("Hello, World!");

This line does all the work in this little program: it prints text to the screen. There are several important details here:

Indentation: Helix style uses four spaces for indentation, not tabs.
Fucntions: print calls a Helix function, that would call the internal std::out fucntion to print.
Strings: The "Hello, World!" string is passed as an argument to print, and the string is printed to the screen.
Semicolons: The line ends with a semicolon ;, which indicates that the statement is complete.

Compiling and Running Are Separate Steps

You’ve just run a newly created program, so let’s examine each step in the process.

Before running a Helix program, you must compile it using the Helix compiler by entering the helix command and passing it the name of your source file, like this:

helix main.hlx -o hello_world --debug

After compiling successfully, Helix outputs a binary executable. On Linux, macOS, and PowerShell on Windows, you can see the executable by entering the ls command in your shell:

Windows
Unix

dir /B

main.hlx
hello_world
hello_world.exe

ls

main.hlx  hello_world  hello_world.pdb

This shows the source code file with the .hlx extension and the executable file (hello_world.exe on Windows, but hello_world on other platforms). From here, you run the executable file like this: You would also notice a file with the .pdb extension if your on windows, thats used by the debugger to understand errors and tracebacks, to allow you to see what bugs there are in your code if any.

Windows
Unix

.\hello_world.exe

./hello_world

If your main.hlx is your “Hello, World!” program, this line prints Hello, World! to your terminal.

Helix is an ahead-of-time compiled language, meaning you can compile a program and give the executable to someone else, and they can run it even without having Helix installed.

Just compiling with helix is fine for simple programs, but as your project grows, you’ll want to manage all the options and make it easy to share your code. Future sections will introduce tools and best practices for writing real-world Helix programs.

Happy coding!