Welcome to Lobster!

Lobster is a statically typed programming language with a Python-esque syntax that combines the advantages of an expressive type system and compile-time memory management with a very lightweight, friendly and terse syntax, by doing most of the heavy lifting for you.

The homepage has more on the "why" of Lobster.

Chat on Discord or Gitter.

This document is the starting point for all the Lobster documentation.

Using the compiler

A quick getting started guide.

More detailed: using Lobster from the command line, or setting up editors such as VSCode, Sublime Text, Notepad++ or vim as IDE. Lite-XL has a syntax highlighting plugin.

Right now VSCode is the only one with a lsp.

Learning the language

If you already know how to program in at least one C-style language (C/C++/C#/Java/JavaScript etc), then a way to get a quick idea of where Lobster is different is by looking at the C-style language Cheat Sheet.

Useful for reference: all builtin functions (this part of the documentation is auto-generated by the compiler).

Tutorials: How to build a 2D shooter step by step in Lobster.

To learn the language more in-depth: The language reference. Check out the style guide before you write lots of code :) Read about the type system or memory management.

Building Lobster

Read about the implementation to be able to compile, extend or use Lobster for your own C++ projects.

Using the engine

Lobster comes with built-in functionality for drawing and many other things.

About Lobster

Lobster was designed and implemented by Wouter van Oortmerssen (aardappel at gmail dot com / strlen.com).

It has been released under the Apache v2 open source licence.

Read about the design philosophy, history and future.