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Nitpick

A safety-critical systems language and its self-hosted compiler.

Looking for the C/C++ prototype that used to live at this address? It is archived, fully browsable, as nitpick-prototype, with its documentation at nitpick-prototype-docs. This repository is its successor — a fresh line that starts at version 0.0, written in Nitpick and compiled by itself. A prototype clone that pulls from here will refuse to merge unrelated histories, which is the intended outcome.

Status: self-hosting declared — cycle 1.4 of the plan (Phase C) is complete; verification (cycle 1.5) is next. The specification set is complete and every design decision is recorded with its reasoning. The compiler is Nitpick source, built by a committed snapshot of its own emission (bootstrap/seed/) and rebuilding itself byte-identically on every full test run; the runtime floor is hand-written LLVM IR and nothing else is linked. The build and test driver npkg is Nitpick too. What comes next is verification (cycle 1.5) — the reason the language exists in this form.

What it is

Nitpick is built for software where a failure is a physical event rather than a debugging inconvenience. Three things matter, in this order: safety, correctness, performance.

What that buys, concretely:

  • Every function returns Result<T> except main and failsafe. There are no exceptions and no unhandled errors — a caller never has to ask whether this particular function can fail.
  • A trap is a controlled shutdown. Anything uncaught routes through a mandatory failsafe handler, so a program with actuators live stops in a state someone chose.
  • No external dependencies. No C, no C++, no third-party runtime. Everything in the trusted computing base is verifiable, and nothing crosses an FFI barrier where a fault could not be intercepted.
  • A large amount of compile-time checking, and the necessary amount at runtime. That is the product, not the tax.

The language is deliberately demanding. It is not optimised for familiarity or for brevity.

Layout

See meta/LAYOUT.md for the tree and the reasoning behind it.

Path Contents
src/ the compiler — Nitpick source only
bootstrap/ the committed bootstrap snapshot (seed/), the retired generator, and the Python harness that runs until npkg parity is proven
tests/ every suite nitpick.toml declares — conformance, the rejection suites by stage, the real-backend programs, acceptance
meta/specs/ the language specification
meta/roadmap/ the plan, in numbered cycles
npkg/ the build and test driver, in Nitpick
runtime/ npkrt.ll, the runtime floor — hand-written LLVM IR

Specification

meta/specs/ is the authority on language semantics. DECISIONS.md records every settled design decision with its reasoning — start there when something looks unusual, because it is recorded why.

Licence

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.