Example Programs

Milo ships real CLI tools and apps as examples — all compile to small native binaries.

CLI Tools

Located in examples/cli-tools/.

Program	Description
grep	Pattern search with color highlighting, -i, -n, -c, -v
wc	Line/word/char counter
hex	Hex dump viewer with ASCII column
tree	Recursive directory tree with depth limiting
cat	File viewer with syntax highlighting
jq	JSON query tool (field access, array iteration)

Apps

Located in examples/apps/.

Program	Description
serve	Static file server with directory listing
http	HTTP client with JSON pretty-printing
webserver	HTTP server with routing
fetch	HTTP client with TLS

Running an example

bun run src/main.ts run examples/cli-tools/grep.milo -- "hello" myfile.txt
bun run src/main.ts build examples/apps/serve.milo -o serve && ./serve

A taste: grep in Milo

from "std/argparse" import { newParser }
from "std/io" import { readLines }

fn main(): i32 {
    var parser = newParser("grep", "search for a string pattern in files")
    parser.addPositional("pattern", "string pattern to search for")
    parser.addPositional("file", "file to search")
    parser.addBool("ignore-case", "i", "case-insensitive search")
    parser.addBool("line-number", "n", "show line numbers")
    parser.addBool("count", "c", "only print count of matching lines")
    let args = parser.parse()

    let pattern = args.getString("pattern")
    let filePath = args.getString("file")

    let content = readFile(filePath)!
    let lines = content.split("\n")

    var lineNum: i64 = 0
    while lineNum < lines.len {
        let line = lines[lineNum]
        if line.contains(pattern) {
            print(line)
        }
        lineNum = lineNum + 1
    }
    return 0
}