@silk-lang/language documentation

The Silk language

• Tutorial — start here: from silk init to a program that runs.
• Language reference — the lexical form, the types, the memory and ownership rules, and the effect system.
• Recursion and the machine stack — what ordinary recursion does and does not guarantee, how running out of stack looks on each engine, and the iterative pattern to use instead.
• Standard library — every module and public declaration, generated from the source doc comments.
• Diagnostic index — every compiler error code and what it means.

The last two pages are generated. Regenerate them with pnpm --filter @silk-lang/compiler documentation:generate; pnpm --filter @silk-lang/compiler test fails while either page is stale, so a new stdlib module or diagnostic code cannot land without its page.

This package

@silk-lang/language provides editor support for Silk: a CodeMirror 6 extension whose highlighting is driven by the compiler's own bootstrap lexer, and the Silk TextMate grammar used by Shiki and VS Code-compatible editors.

Highlighting from the real lexer

The CodeMirror extension does not carry a grammar of its own. It lexes the document with @silk-lang/compiler/Lexer and maps each token kind to a highlight style, so what the editor colors is exactly what the compiler sees — including invalid bytes:

/// Returns the answer to everything.
pub fn answer() -> i32 {
    return 42
}

pub fn main() -> i32 {
    let ok = true
    if ok { return answer() } else { return 0 }
    return 0
}

Every highlighted span also carries a stable cm-silk-<category> class (keyword, boolean, number, identifier, line-comment, doc-comment, operator, punctuation, invalid), so an app can restyle tokens with plain CSS on top of whatever CodeMirror highlight style is active.

TextMate grammar

The TextMate module exports the Silk grammar (source.silk) and a VS Code language configuration. The grammar's keyword alternations are built from a keyword table that is type-exhaustive over the compiler's token kinds, so a keyword change in the compiler fails this package's typecheck until the grammar follows.