The tour

Eight short programs, each showing one thing W# does differently.

Every program on these pages is a real file in the compiler’s repository, run by its test suite on every commit, and quoted here in full rather than trimmed. You can follow along:

git clone https://github.com/sinisterMage/WSharp
cd WSharp
wsharp run examples/status.ws

The order matters a little. Dispatch and Inference are the two ideas the rest of the language is arranged around, so read those first. After that the pages are largely independent.

• Multiple dispatch A response renderer written as a set of small overloads rather than a growing switch.
• Type inference Not a single type is written down, and every one of them is still checked.
• Optionals and errors ?T may be absent, !T may have failed, and !T says which failures it means.
• Structs and closures Nominal records, implicit widening to a supertype, and functions as values.
• Arrays and lists A fixed-length array whose count is in its header, and the growable type built on it.
• Generics Explicit type parameters on functions, structs and fn literals, all monomorphised.
• Modules @import binds a module to a name, pub says what another module may see.
• Workers and the broker Threads that own their heaps, talking by typed calls or through a partitioned log.