Source: https://github.com/irmen/

Another 6502 oriented project comes from Irmen de Jong. If you are familiar with the C64, you know, that besides the usual suspects Basic and Assembly, there are a number of other languages that can be used to give the little 8-bit CPU quite a run for its money.

Really amazing is the Rust compiler we had in issue #17.

But Irmen takes a different approach. Instead of forcing a more or less modern high level language into the tight corset of the 6502, he simply designed a structured programming language for the 6502, 6510 and 65c02 family completely from scratch.

The project named Prog8 has a whole list of advantages. Less code than raw Assembly, high execution speed, modularity but especially the native support of types like 16-bit words, floats and strings makes working with the language a real pleasure.

If you want to stay close to the 6502 hardware, Prog8 seems to be the best alternative besides Assembly at the moment. Nice, easy to read code and still high execution speed were not really congruent to each other until this project arrived.

Current compiler targets are the C64 and CommanderX16 ... uhhh, I said it ... the bad word. 🤫