The Wuffs project is both a programming language and a standard library written in that programming language (and then e.g. transpiled to C). For more details on the latter, see the Wuffs the Library document. As for Wuffs the Language, it is an imperative C-like memory-safe language that should look roughly familiar to somebody versed in one of C, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Rust, etc. The major differentiating features are:
- Facts and compile-time assertions.
- Type refinements.
- Coroutines and an effects
system. The
!and?exclamation and question marks denote impure and coroutine effects. - No way to dynamically allocate or free memory.
Minor features or restrictions include:
- Nullable and non-nullable pointers, spelled
nptr Tandptr T. - Integrated I/O.
- Iterate loops.
- Public vs private API is marked with the
pubandprikeywords. Visibility boundaries are at the package level, unlike C++ or Java's type level. - No variable shadowing. All local variables must be declared before any other statements in a function body.
- Like Go, semi-colons can be omitted. Similarly, the
()parentheses around aniforwhilecondition are optional, but the{}curly braces are mandatory. There is no 'dangling else' ambiguity. - Labeled jumps look like
break.loopnameandcontinue.loopname, for a matchingwhile.loopname. Thewhile.loopname's closing curly brace must be followed byendwhile.loopname. - A
while trueloop's block may use double-curly braces:{{and}}. The formatter will not add an indent to the code inside the block. This is useful when usingwhile true {{ etc; break; etc; break }}to simulate what would be a (forwards)gotoin other languages' straight-line code.
Wuffs code is formatted by the
wuffsfmt program.
Types read from left to right: ptr array[100] base.u32 is a non-null pointer
to a 100-element array of unsigned 32-bit integers. Types can also be
refined.
Structs are a list of fields, enclosed in parentheses: struct foo(x: base.u32, y: base.u32), possibly extended (by a +) with a second list of optionally
initialized fields.
The struct name, foo, may be followed by a question mark ?, which means
that its methods may be coroutines.
All functions are methods (with an implicit this argument). There are no
free-standing functions.
Function definitions read from left to right. func foo.bar(x: base.u32, y: base.u32) base.u32 is a function (a method on the foo struct type) that
takes two base.u32s and returns a base.u32. Each argument must be named at
the call site. It is m = f.bar(x: 10, y: 20), not m = f.bar(10, 20).
There is no operator precedence. A bare a * b + c is an invalid expression.
You must explicitly write either (a * b) + c or a * (b + c).
Some binary operators (+, *, &, |, ^, and, or) are also
associative: (a + b) + c and a + (b + c) are equivalent, and can be spelled
a + b + c.
The logical operators, && and || and ! in C, are spelled and and or
and not in Wuffs. Not-equals is spelled <>, as the ! exclamation mark is
reserved for impure effects.
Expressions involving the standard arithmetic operators (e.g. *, +), will
not compile if overflow is possible. Some of these operators have alternative
'tilde' forms (e.g. ~mod*, ~sat+) which provide
modular and
saturating arithmetic. By definition,
these never overflow.
The as operator, e.g. x as T, converts an expression x to the type T.
There is no string type. There are arrays and
slices of bytes (base.u8s), but bear
in mind that Wuffs code cannot allocate or free
memory.
Double-quoted literals like "#bad checksum" are actually
statuses, axiom names or a
use "std/foo" package name.
Single-quoted literals are actually numerical constants. For example, 'A' and
'\t' are equivalent to 0x41 and 0x09. These literals are not restricted
to a single ASCII byte or even a single Unicode code point, and can decode to
multiple bytes when finished with a be or le endianness suffix. For
example, '\x01\x02'be is equivalent to 0x0102. Similarly, '\u0394?'le
(which can also be written 'Δ?'le) is equivalent to 0x3F94CE, because the
UTF-8 encodings of U+0394 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA and U+003F QUESTION MARK
(the ASCII ?) is (0xCE, 0x94) and (0x3F).
Double-quoted literals cannot contain backslashes, as they'd be an unnecessary
complication. Single-quoted literals can contain backslash-escapes, as they are
often compared with arbitrary binary data. For example, where other programming
languages would check if JPEG data starts with the magic string "\xFF\xD8",
Wuffs would check if its opening 2 bytes, read as a little-endian base.u16,
is a number that equals '\xFF\xD8'le.
A simple Wuffs the Language program, unrelated to Wuffs the Library, is discussed in /hello-wuffs-c.