This is a port of Alef Programming Language to Unix and Plan 9 From User Space. See alef-plan9 for the Plan 9 version of Alef.
Alef is a concurrent programming language designed for systems software. Exception handling, process management, and synchronization primitives are implemented by the language. Programs can be written using both shared variable and message passing paradigms. Expressions use the same syntax as C, but the type system is substantially different. Alef supports object-oriented programming through static inheritance and information hiding. The language does not provide garbage collection, so programs are expected to manage their own memory.
In order to use Alef you need to build a compiler, loader and optionally assembler and archiver (you need them to build a standard library). To build a compiler, you need to have lib9 and libbio from plan9port. For a convenience, all necessary libraries are backported and stripped to a bare minimum for build to work.
After building a compiler and loader, you can start writing programs. If you want to use Alef's full potential, you'll also need to build a runtime, which provides support for guarded sections, alloc/unalloc, alt, par, proc, task primitives as well as for a channel type and its operations.
There is a make.sh script available to build/clean everything at once: bootstrap libraries, toolchain, libA, libbio, libmach, Alef libraries, test programs and examples from user guide. Provide -v flag to see actual commands as they are running.
Currently only freebsd/386 is supported. It shouldn't be difficult to port it to linux or other BSD flavours. It also shouldn't be difficult to build it for sparc and mips architectures (all necessary files could be taken from original Alef distribution.
What's not that simple, however, is porting it to amd64. That would require writing an architecture-specific portion of a compiler and also porting 6l(1) and 6a(1) from Plan 9, although latter is not that difficult.
Also not the entire standard library is ported. Currently it's work in progress. Some functions may not work, some may be absent and some are explicitly calling werrstr("not implemented");.
There are a few pieces of documentation available:
- Alef Language Reference Manual by Phil Winterbottom.
- Alef User’s Guide by Bob Flandrena.
- Man pages for Alef compiler and libraries.
- 8a(1) man page.
- 8l(1) man page.
- ar(1) man page.
Pavlovskii Anton, 2024 (MIT). See LICENSE file for more details.