Polaron

Repository

jvpts11/Polaron

Language

C++

Status

Compiler and toolchain working, 952 tests across five targets

On the desktop

Open Polaron

Polaron aims to be as fast as C and C++ while being safer by construction: value semantics, no garbage collector, and no exploitable undefined behaviour. Bounds, division and casts are checked or saturated rather than left undefined, and ownership and regions give control over memory without a collector.

The toolchain

polaron is the project driver and polc underneath it is the compiler. The loop is short:

polaron new hello
cd hello
polaron run

The other verbs are build, test, check, fmt, doc, explain, plug and studio. Libraries are installed with polaron plug <url>, which fetches, compiles and records them in polaron.toml, carrying their own link requirements inside the bundle.

What runs today

The suite is 952 tests. Besides the host, Polaron builds for and executes on x86-64 Windows, x86-64 Linux, an i686 kernel booted under QEMU and read back over the serial port, an aarch64 kernel over a PL011 UART, and wasm32 loaded in a real browser.

The compiler itself is C++20, CMake and LLVM 17+, and a Windows installer bundles a self-contained toolchain that needs no Visual Studio on the target machine.

Regions: many objects, one lifetime

A region is an arena you allocate once and hand out of. Everything built in it lives exactly as long as the region does, and a region declares what it accepts, so putting the wrong type in it is a compile error rather than a convention. From examples/regions.pol:

region pen = itself.allocate(1 kilobytes).accepts({Dog});
Dog* a = new Dog(3) in region pen;
Dog* b = new Dog(7) in region pen;
Dog* c = new Dog(2) in region pen;
System.IO.Console.println($"the pack: {a.age()} {b.age()} {c.age()}");
// new Cat(9) in region pen; here is a COMPILE ERROR: the region said Dog.
release region pen;

The repository carries twenty-one complete examples, each compiled and run by the test suite and checked against the output its own header promises.

Ecosystem

Polaron-OpenGL is the binding agents.exe plugs in to draw its world.