Design philosophy

The intent

Sn takes inspiration from C++'s useful hardware model while aiming for a more predictable compilation model. Its design favors deterministic parsing and resolution, explicit costs, and a familiar surface syntax.

Systems programming

• Values live inline unless indirection or allocation is explicit.
• Allocation and recoverable failure are visible in APIs.
• Cleanup is deterministic; the language design excludes garbage collection and exceptions.
• Static dispatch is the default. Virtual and interface boundaries are explicit.

Compilation is a product goal

Fast ordinary edit, build, and run workflows are a central goal. Performance work is ongoing. This site makes no claim that current builds meet all compile-time or runtime performance targets.

A shared compiler path

Ahead-of-time compilation and in-process JIT share the frontend and typed SnIR model, with LLVM as the code-generation backend. Exact platform support depends on the distributed toolchain.