Contributing

xisto is developed at github.com/xistolang/xisto; ported npm packages live in github.com/xistolang/packages. Issues and pull requests are welcome.

Build from source

Needs a C compiler (clang or gcc), make, python3, xxd and cmake (for AWS-LC, downloaded once and checked by SHA-256; make TLS=bearssl skips it and uses BearSSL, in the tree).

git clone https://github.com/xistolang/xisto && cd xisto
make                 # build/xisto
make test            # the suite: tests/ok compares stdout+stderr with Node (needs node), tests/err the diagnostics
make dist VERSION=x.y.z   # a release archive in dist/

xisto runs on macOS (kqueue) and Linux (epoll), ARM64 and x86-64. sh tests/linux/test.sh linux/arm64 runs the suite in Docker.

Tests compare with Node

• tests/ok/ holds programs whose stdout and stderr are compared with Node's, byte for byte. Every .expected output comes from running the program on Node; it is never written by hand.
• tests/err/ holds programs whose diagnostics are checked.
• Every language or package change comes with a test that runs the same program on Node.
• Compiler and CLI messages are in English.

Layout

src/          the compiler: lexer → parser → checker → C emitter (and the QBE emitter)
runtime/      the runtime embedded in every generated program (memory, strings, event loop, net, TLS, regex)
packages/     the xisto:* standard packages (npm ports live in xistolang/packages)
tests/        ok/ (output compared with Node), err/ (expected diagnostics)
bench/        benchmark programs, scripts and versioned results (bench/results/)
examples/     a larger program (a REST API); NestJS examples live in xistolang/packages
editors/      VS Code extension
third_party/  BearSSL, QBE, SQLite (and AWS-LC, downloaded)

Packages

A port of an npm package goes to xistolang/packages, not to this repository:

• Implement the subset of the npm API that is needed, with the npm package's semantics, and test it against the real npm package on Node: the same program must give the same output.
• Every package says, in the header comment of its index.ts, what it implements and what it accepts without implementing. A silently ignored option compiles fine and is the costliest gap.
• Tests use synthetic code: code from a private project never goes into either repository.

Documentation

This site is in docs/ (Docusaurus). To preview it:

cd docs
npm ci
npm start

License

xisto is licensed under Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception. The exception means programs compiled with xisto, which carry its runtime, do not need to reproduce xisto's license notice.