Ante

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Ante is a low-level functional language for exploring refinement types, lifetime inference, and other fun features. Here's a quick taste:

// No lifetime variables
foo (x: &shared mut Bar) (y: &a) : a can Fail given Clone a =
    // Algebraic effects
    if not valid x then fail ()

    // Safe, aliasable mutable references
    baz x x

    // Traits
    clone y

In general, ante is low-level (no GC, values aren't boxed by default) while also trying to be as readable as possible by encouraging high-level approaches that can be optimized with low-level details later on.

See the website, language tour, and roadmap for more information.

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Contributing

The compiler is still in a rather early state so any contributors are greatly welcome. Feel free to contribute to either any known issues/improvements or any standard library additions you think may be useful.

Each file in the codebase is prefixed with a module comment explaining the purpose of the file and any algorithms used. src/main.rs is a good place to start reading.

Make sure any PRs pass the tests in the examples directory. These tests have commands in them which the goldentests library uses to run the ante compiler and check its output for each file against the expected output contained within comments of that file.

Good first issues to contribute to

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Community

The best place to follow ante's development is in the official discord: https://discord.gg/BN97fKnEH2. There is also the mostly inactive subreddit at /r/ante which is mainly used for questions about the language rather than development updates. You can also feel free to file issues or ask questions on this repository.

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Building

Ante currently optionally requires llvm 16.0 while building. If you already have this installed with sources, you may be fine building with cargo install --path . alone. If cargo complains about not finding any suitable llvm version, you can either choose to build ante without the llvm backend via cargo install --path . --no-default-features or you can build llvm from source via CMake as covered in the next sections.

Linux and Mac

The easiest method to install llvm 16.0 would be through your package manager, making sure to install any -dev packages if they are available for your distro. Once installed, if cargo b still cannot find the right version of llvm, you may need to make sure to set the LLVM_SYS_160_PREFIX to the path llvm was installed to:

$ LLVM_SYS_160_PREFIX=$(llvm-config --obj-root)

If your distro ships a version other than llvm 16.0 you can try changing the inkwell dependency Ante's Cargo.toml. This dependency controls the llvm version expected and by default it is:

inkwell = { git = "https://github.com/TheDan64/inkwell", branch = "master", features = ["llvm16-0"], optional = true }

Change the quoted llvm portion to "llvm-15-0" for example to build with llvm 15.0. Also don't forget that after changing this version the environment variable's name will be different, using llvm 15.0 for example it would be LLVM_SYS_150_PREFIX. It is likely that versions older than this will not work since there have been API changes in LLVM itself and inkwell. 15.0 itself is also unverified.

If this method does not work you will have to try building llvm from source via cmake. See the CMake section below. Alternatively, you can build with only cranelift as a backend via cargo install --path . --no-default-features.

Nix

Ante is available in the unstable branch of the nixpkgs repository.

The project itself provides build instructions for the Nix package manager. Those can be used for the most recent version of the compiler, or for working on it.

To enter the development environment, run either nix-shell or nix develop depending on whether you are using nix with flakes and nix command enabled or not. Then you can build and run the project with cargo as described at the top of this section.

Beyond that, the project will also build with nix-build / nix build, meaning you can install it on your system using the provided overlay or play around with the compiler via nix shell github:jfecher/ante.

Windows

Note: LLVM is notoriously difficult to build on windows. If you're a windows user who has tried the following and still cannot build llvm, I highly recommend trying out ante without the llvm backend via cargo install --path . --no-default-features. Since the llvm binaries do not ship with the appropriate library files on windows, you will have to build from source via CMake

CMake

If the above steps don't work for you, you can try building llvm from source with cmake. If you're on windows, this requires you to have Visual Studio 2017 or later installed already.

$ git clone https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project --branch=release/16.x
$ mkdir llvm-build
$ cd llvm-build
$ cmake ../llvm-project/llvm

At this point, cmake may show an error that it failed to find z3 or the windows SDK, in which case you may need to install them. For the windows SDK, you can install it via the Visual Studio Installer (under Modify -> Individual Components). I used version 10.0.17763.0, though it is likely newer versions will work as well. Rerun the last cmake command to test that everything is installed right. Once this is done, move on to compiling llvm and ante:

$ cmake --build .
$ cmake --build . --target install
$ cd ..
$ set LLVM_SYS_160_PREFIX=/absolute/path/to/llvm-build
$ cargo build