oxl

oxl is a small language for the kind of tools Oxidean builds: memory safety from dynamic ownership/borrow checking, structured concurrency (scope/spawn/channels), and ahead-of-time native binaries from a single toolchain. MIT-licensed.

Status: v0.4.x

The v0.4 release line is out: the shipped binary covers build/run/test/ fmt/doc/lsp plus the package/module system (oxl.mod, oxl get, oxl mod, MVS build lists), shipped since v0.3.0. The compiler works end to end: the programs in examples/ compile to native binaries today (including an HTTP CRUD + SQLite service and a GTK4 todo app), and the toolchain’s own lexer, parser, checker, and C emitter are written in oxl and compile themselves. Still v0: dynamic checking is not yet unconditional (two documented gaps remain in docs/semantics/ownership.md), and the design spec is the source of truth.

Design at a glance

• Ownership without ceremony: own / ref / mut handles with runtime borrow checks and compile-time move tracking.
• Structured concurrency: scope/spawn plus channels; suspend-capable functions compile to stackless state machines; tasks are ~96 B frames, not threads.
• Errors you can’t drop: [v, err] returns; dropping the error is a compile error.
• One toolchain: oxl build|run|test|fmt|doc|lsp plus get/mod for modules, AOT to native through a C backend. The release tarball ships for Linux (x86_64); macOS (aarch64) and Windows (x86_64, MinGW/clang) are supported source builds.

Where to next

Get the toolchainDownload the tarball, PATH, first binary.

The languageThe v0 surface: types, ownership, concurrency, modules, stdlib.

oxidean/oxlCompiler source, examples, and the design spec.