About Scopes#

Scopes is a general purpose programming language and compiler infrastructure specifically suited for short turnaround prototyping and development of high performance applications in need of multi-stage compilation at runtime.

The project was started as an alternative to C++ for programming computer games and related tools, specifically for solutions that depend heavily on live procedural generation or aim to provide good modding support.

The compiler is written in about 30k lines of C++ code, supports a LLVM as well as a SPIR-V backend (targeting both CPU and GPU with a single codebase), and exports a minimal runtime environment. The remaining features are bootstrapped from within the language.

The language is expression-based, but primarily imperative. The syntactical style marries concepts from Scheme and Python, describing source code with S-expressions but delimiting blocks by indentation rather than braces. Closures are supported as a zero-cost abstraction. The type system is strongly statically typed but fully inferred, therefore every function is a template. Both nominal and structural typing are supported. Type primitives roughly match C level, but are aimed to be expandable without limitations. The memory model is compatible to C/C++ and supports simple unmanaged stack and heap memory, as well as "view propagation", a declaration free variant of borrow checking specifically designed for Scopes. A custom lightweight exception protocol that is fully compatible with C is supported.

Scopes provides many metaprogramming facilities such as programmable syntax sugar and AST macros, metadata necessary for basic step-by-step debugging as well as inspection of types, constants, intermediate code, optimized output and disassembly. The environment is suitable for development of domain specific languages to describe configuration files, user interfaces, state machines or processing graphs.

Scopes embeds the clang compiler infrastructure and is therefore fully C compatible. C libraries can be imported and executed at compile time and runtime without overhead and without requiring special bindings.

The Scopes Compiler Intermediate Language is suitable for painless translation to SSA forms such as LLVM IR and SPIR-V, of which both are supported. The SPIR-V backend also emits GLSL shader code on the fly.

The Scopes compiler fundamentally differs from C++ and other traditional AOT (ahead of time) compilers, in that the compiler is designed to remain on-line at runtime so that functions can be recompiled when the need arises, and generated machine code can adapt to the instruction set present on the target machine. This also diminishes the need for a build system. Still, Scopes is not a JIT compiler. Compilation is always explicitly initiated by the user.