NLang 0.5.0 adds a debugging suite to nide — set breakpoints, run, step and inspect directly in the IDE.

Debugging in nide

• F5 starts a debug session: the program builds, then runs to the first
  breakpoint or to completion; pressing F5 again continues. Shift+F5
  stops the session — a hard terminate that always works, including inside
  infinite loops or native code. Run without debugging moved to Ctrl+F5.
• F9 (or a gutter click) toggles a breakpoint: a filled dot is bound in
  the live session, a hollow dot is not. Breakpoints persist across nide
  restarts and follow file renames.
• F10/F11/Shift+F11 step over/into/out. The paused line is highlighted
  with a gutter arrow.
• The new 调试 page shows the session status, a 抛异常时中断
  (break-on-throw) switch, the call stack (clicking a frame selects it,
  jumps to the line and refreshes locals) and the selected frame's locals.
• Program output and error backtraces stream to the 运行输出 page.

nide drives the existing ndb through a new machine interface (ndb --machine, a tab-separated line protocol) in a child process — the IDE
never links the VM, and stopping always terminates the child.

Engine

• Loop debug anchors now fire on every iteration (gdb-aligned): a
  breakpoint on a while/for line hits per iteration.
• IHostIo — a host I/O seam for embedded front ends: output arrives
  through a callback, and a host that declares no input makes
  io.readLine raise a catchable IOException instead of consuming the
  embedder's stream.
• DebugSessionController extracted as the front-end-agnostic session
  core; the CLI and machine front ends are thin adapters over it.

See the docs site (在 nide 中调试) for a walkthrough, including the v1
limitations (no stdin in a session, no line-drift tracking within a
session).

NLang 0.4.0 adds ndb, a CLI debugger for compiled modules.

ndb — ndb <module.nmod>

• Breakpoints: b <file.n:LINE | LINE | funcName> (a bare LINE resolves in
  the current frame's file), i b to list, d <id> to delete
• c continue; s/n/f step into / over / out; bt backtrace;
  frame <n> select a frame; info locals; p <name> print one local
• l [line] source window with a -> stop marker; x disassembly of the
  selected frame with the current pc marked
• catch on|off — break on throw (freezes at the throw site, before
  unwinding, with the full stack and locals still alive)
• Initial stop at the first statement (like gdb start); stdin EOF behaves
  like q; ndb exits with the debugged program's exit code

VM debug hooks (for embedders)

• IDebugHooks — statement and throw checkpoints; IVmDebugView — a
  read-only view over the frozen state (frames, locals, display strings).
  Front-end-agnostic interfaces a future DAP adapter or the IDE can reuse.
• Disassembly printing extracted into a shared Disassembler; ndisasm
  output is byte-identical.

.nmod format v1.9

• Each function records its source file path — the basis for cross-file
  breakpoint addressing (b file.n:LINE).
• The import merge now also copies func.locals, fixing a pre-existing GC
  root-set hole where imported frames had an empty root set.
• Breaking: the format floor is raised from 8 to 9 — older modules are
  refused by the loader and must be recompiled.

Install

Windows: unzip the portable zip anywhere, or run the NSIS installer.
Feedback welcome at https://github.com/dliting/nlang/issues.

Added

• nide: the About dialog now shows the project's GitHub address
  (https://github.com/dliting/nlang) as a blue underlined link; clicking
  it opens the default browser.

Changed

• Language: && and || now short-circuit — the skipped operand is
  never evaluated (no side effects, no throws), matching C/C++/Java/Python
  conventions. Results stay int 0/1. Operands of &&, || and !
  must now be int: float/string operands were previously read as raw bits
  with meaningless truthiness and are now a compile error.

Breaking: the eager OP_LogicalAnd/OP_LogicalOr bytecode instructions
were removed — old .nmod modules must be recompiled.

As with previous releases, the zip and the NSIS installer contain the same
layout: bin/ with nide, ncc, nvm, ndisasm and the Qt runtime, plus
examples/, the offline documentation site, LICENSE, CHANGELOG.md and
README.md. The installer defaults to C:\Program Files\NLang; the zip is
portable — unzip anywhere writable and run bin\nide.exe.

Second release.

• nide: File > Recent submenu — recent solutions, projects and files (most-recently-used, persisted across sessions, disambiguated by parent directory).
• Centralized version management: the repository-root VERSION file is now the single source of the version — tool --version output, the About dialog, the docs-site footer and package names all derive from it.
• Debuts CHANGELOG.md (Keep a Changelog format).

Windows assets: portable zip and NSIS installer. The executables link the MSVC runtime dynamically — install the VC++ Redistributable (aka.ms/vs/17/release/vc_redist.x64.exe) if Visual Studio 2022 is not on the machine.

Gates at tag time: ctest 36/36, e2e 821 passed / 0 failed, nlang-docs pytest 49 passed / 5 skipped, verify_package OK.

First public release of NLang.

NLang is a statically-typed scripting language extracted from a game engine I previously developed, shipped as a standalone teaching/research project: a compiler front end (ncc), a custom bytecode VM (nvm), a disassembler (ndisasm) and a Qt5 IDE (nide).

Downloads (Windows x64)

• NLang-0.1.0-win64.zip — portable: unzip and run bin\nide.exe
• NLang-0.1.0-win64.exe — NSIS installer (Start Menu shortcut, defaults to C:\Program Files\NLang)

Both packages contain the full toolchain, runnable examples and the bundled offline documentation site (also reachable from the IDE Help menu). Packaging is verified per build: layout audit, offline docs-site audit, and a real compile-and-run smoke test of examples/hello.n with the packaged tools.

Language highlights

• Static typing with classes, structs, interfaces and enums; generics via built-in List<K> / Dict<K,V>
• Function and method references (Func), exception handling with finally, string interpolation, switch, foreach over arrays and collections
• Explicit cross-module imports (.nproj projects, external .nmod modules)
• Standard library: io / math / fs namespaces plus built-in string methods

Notes

• The executables link the MSVC runtime dynamically — install the VC++ Redistributable if Visual Studio 2022 is not present.
• The installer defaults to C:\Program Files\NLang (needs admin); copy examples/ to a writable folder before opening them in the IDE.

Test baseline at tag: 821 end-to-end tests and 32 ctest suites, all passing.

Building from source, the language reference and indexed examples: see the repository README.