Our first program

Let's start with the most basic Inko program one can write: "hello world". This is a program that does one simple thing: print the text "Hello, world!" to STDOUT.

Create a file called hello.inko and place it anywhere you like. We'll refer to this file as hello.inko from now on. With the file in place, add the following to it, then save it:

import std::stdio::stdout

stdout.print('Hello, world!')

Now open a shell and navigate to the directory containing hello.inko, then run the following:

inko hello.inko

If all went well, this will print "Hello, world!" to STDOUT. Congratulations, you just wrote your first Inko program!

Diving deeper

Let's dive into our program and explain how it actually works. After all, there's no point in writing a program if you don't understand what it does.

Imports

We begin the program with the following line:

import std::stdio::stdout

This is known as an "import". In Inko, we use imports to load modules into your own module. A module is just a file of Inko source code, and can define things such as types, methods, and constants.

In this case, we import the module stdout from the std::stdio namespace. A namespace is essentially a folder of one or more modules.

Coming from other programming languages, it may be a bit odd that you have to import a module just to write data to STDOUT. This is necessary because we do not want to clutter modules with imports that are not used. Since not every program needs to write to STDOUT, the stdout module must be imported explicitly.

In this particular case, the module we are importing is std::stdio::stdout. The module is made available using the symbol stdout. You can import multiple symbols (and rename them), but this will be discussed separately.

Methods and messages

Once we have imported our module, we reach the following line:

stdout.print('Hello, world!')

Here stdout refers to the module we imported earlier on. print is a message that we send to the stdout module, and this message takes a String as an argument. In this case the argument is the String "Hello, world!", which will get printed to STDOUT.

So what's the difference between a message and a method? In most cases there is no difference, but in some cases the compiler may decide to optimise code such that a different method is called. For this reason we use the term "messages" and "message passing", instead of "method calls".