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Tycho

Tycho is an experimental systems language built to test one idea: implicit hierarchical arenas under value semantics. Each scope owns a memory arena, freed when the scope exits; with no reference type in the language, the compiler sees every value's lifetime from the syntax alone and inserts every allocation and free itself. The result is automatic memory management — no garbage collector, no manual free — from lexical scope rather than a runtime. It transpiles to C and builds with cc and make.

It's a research project — an experiment testing that one idea — not a production language. But it's a heavily-checked one, and that's the part most experiments this young skip; see Is it production-ready? in the FAQ.

fn greet(name: string) -> string:
    return "hello " + name

fn main():
    name := input()
    println(greet(name))

Start here

• Install Tycho — a C compiler and make, nothing else to install.
• Tutorial — from hello-world to a real program in about an hour.
• The thesis — the one idea, with the measurements and the places it costs.
• From malloc to arenas — the memory model, explained from the C you already know.

Find your way around

The reader documentation is mirrored into this wiki — see the Documentation Map for the full index of the reference and the how-to guides. The canonical source stays in the repo under /docs, and the formal language specification lives there.

• FAQ — garbage collector? references? production-ready? how fast?
• Documentation Map — reference, guides, spec.
• Contributing — the two-compiler discipline and the local gate.

Links

• Website — https://tycho-lang.com
• Source — https://github.com/StefanVonRanda/tycho
• License — MIT