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description=An experimental successor to C++;

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Text of the page (random words):
e done with an incomplete interface 002360 types are values of type type 002365 remove artificial version ceiling on c interop 002376 constraints must use self 002483 replace keyword is with impls 002511 assignment statements 002550 simplified package declaration for the main package 002551 roadmap for 2023 and retrospective for 2022 002665 semicolons terminate statements 002687 termination algorithm for impl selection 002759 defining the 0 1 language 002760 consistent class and interface syntax 002868 allow overlap with a final impl if identical 002875 functions function types and function calls 002922 introduce a new conduct team 002964 expression phase terminology 003162 reduce ambiguity in terminology 003403 change main default to an api file 003407 clarify name bindings in namespaces 003532 focus implementation effort on the toolchain 003564 roadmap for 2024 and a retrospective for 2023 003646 tuples and tuple indexing 003720 member binding operators 003762 merging forward declarations 003763 matching redeclarations 003797 raw identifier syntax 003833 semir fidelity when representing rewrite semantics 003848 lambdas 003927 more consistent package syntax 003938 exporting imported names 003980 singular extern declarations 004075 change operator precedence 004105 establish toolchain and language versioning 004246 getting commit access 004682 the core array type for direct storage immutably sized buffers 004864 no predeclared identifiers core is a keyword 004880 safety milestones and a 2025 roadmap 005017 destructor syntax 005087 qualified lookup into types being defined 005164 updates to pattern matching for objects 005168 forward impl declaration of an incomplete interface 005233 towards more async sync ing 005270 move explorer out of toolchain git repository 005337 interface extension and final impl update 005366 the name of an impl in class scope 005434 ref parameters arguments returns and val returns 005448 carbon c interop primitive types 005545 expression form basics 005606 keep design documents current 005661 progressive disclosure principle 005670 guidance on ai coding tools 005689 semantic identity and order dependent resolution for rewrite constraints 005914 updating carbon s safety strategy 006008 replace impl fn with override fn 006177 c interop mapping std string_view to core str 006231 disambiguate value binding 006254 c interop toolchain implementation for function calls 006333 cli and separate compilation 006357 c interop mapping pointer types 006358 c interop api importing and semantics 006395 type completeness in extend 006641 clang irgen in carbon 006668 c interop type mapping for integer and floating point literals 006676 carbon c interop importing c c object like macros 006699 diagnostic sorting 006710 char redesign 006716 move toolchain alternatives to proposals 006902 identification of a named constraint during definition 006910 support octal literals 007016 updating self syntax and adding static member variables 007140 orphan rule for scopes 007254 replace and with keywords and contextual defaults 007299 ensure where requirements in named constraints are visible to lookups 007308 clarify support for imported object like macros 007314 charliteral difference should be an intliteral 007381 adopt ref in core iterate next 007441 trailing comments 007493 disallow impl in match_first twice 007545 restrict observe declarations to names that are part of the enclosing interface 007697 updates to member access code of conduct security policy discord github carbon language an experimental successor to c why goals status getting started join us see our announcement video from cppnorth note that carbon is not ready for use fast and works with c performance matching c using llvm with low level access to bits and addresses interoperate with your existing c code from inheritance to templates fast and scalable builds that work with your existing c build systems modern and evolving solid language foundations that are easy to learn especially if you have used c easy tool based upgrades between carbon versions safer fundamentals and an incremental path towards a memory safe subset welcoming open source community clear goals and priorities with robust governance community that works to be welcoming inclusive and friendly batteries included approach compiler libraries docs tools package manager and more why build carbon c remains the dominant programming language for performance critical software with massive and growing codebases and investments however it is struggling to improve and meet developers needs as outlined above in no small part due to accumulating decades of technical debt incrementally improving c is extremely difficult both due to the technical debt itself and challenges with its evolution process the best way to address these problems is to avoid inheriting the legacy of c or c directly and instead start with solid language foundations like modern generics system modular code organization and consistent simple syntax existing modern languages already provide an excellent developer experience go swift kotlin rust and many more developers that can use one of these existing languages should unfortunately the designs of these languages present significant barriers to adoption and migration from c these barriers range from changes in the idiomatic design of software to performance overhead carbon is fundamentally a successor language approach rather than an attempt to incrementally evolve c it is designed around interoperability with c as well as large scale adoption and migration for existing c codebases and developers a successor language for c requires performance matching c an essential property for our developers seamless bidirectional interoperability with c such that a library anywhere in an existing c stack can adopt carbon without porting the rest a gentle learning curve with reasonable familiarity for c developers comparable expressivity and support for existing software s design and architecture scalable migration with some level of source to source translation for idiomatic c code with this approach we can build on top of c s existing ecosystem and bring along existing investments codebases and developer populations there are a few languages that have followed this model for other ecosystems and carbon aims to fill an analogous role for c javascript typescript java kotlin c carbon language goals we are designing carbon to support performance critical software software and language evolution code that is easy to read understand and write practical safety and testing mechanisms fast and scalable development modern os platforms hardware architectures and environments interoperability with and migration from existing c code while many languages share subsets of these goals what distinguishes carbon is their combination we also have explicit non goals for carbon notably including a stable application binary interface abi for the entire language and library perfect backwards or forwards compatibility our detailed goals document fleshes out these ideas and provides a deeper view into our goals for the carbon project and language project status carbon language is currently an experimental project we are hard at work on a toolchain implementation with compiler and linker you can try out the current state at compiler explorer com we want to better understand whether we can build a language that meets our successor language criteria and whether the resulting language can gather a critical mass of interest within the larger c industry and community currently we have fleshed out several core aspects of both carbon the project and the language the strategy of the carbon language and project an open source project structure governance model and evolution process critical and foundational aspects of the language design informed by our experience with c and the most difficult challenges we anticipate this includes designs for generics class types inheritance operator overloading lexical and syntactic structure code organization and modular structure an under development compiler and toolchain that will compile carbon and eventually c code as well into standard executable code this is where most of our current implementation efforts are directed historically there was also a prototype explorer interpreter that implemented an older version of the carbon language design but is no longer under development and has been archived if you re interested in contributing we re currently focused on developing the carbon toolchain until it can support carbon c interop beyond that we plan to continue developing the design and toolchain until we can ship the 0 1 language and support evaluating carbon in more detail you can see our full roadmap for more details carbon and c if you re already a c developer carbon should have a gentle learning curve it is built out of a consistent set of language constructs that should feel familiar and be easy to read and understand the carbon code here is hypothetical and meant to show the look and feel of the language c code like this corresponds to this carbon code you can call carbon from c without overhead and the other way around this means you migrate a single c library to carbon within an application or write new carbon on top of your existing c investment for example read more about c interop in carbon beyond interoperability between carbon and c we re also planning to support migration tools that will mechanically translate idiomatic c code into carbon code to help you switch an existing c codebase to carbon generics carbon provides a modern generics system with checked definitions while still supporting opt in templates for seamless c interop checked generics provide several advantages compared to c templates generic definitions are fully type checked removing the need to instantiate to check for errors and giving greater confidence in code avoids the compile time cost of re checking the definition for every instantiation when using a definition checked generic usage error messages are clearer directly showing which requirements are not met enables automatic opt in type erasure and dynamic dispatch without a separate implementation this can reduce the binary size and enables constructs like heterogeneous containers strong checked interfaces mean fewer accidental dependencies on implementation details and a clearer contract for consumers without sacrificing these advantages carbon generics support specialization ensuring it can fully address performance critical use cases of c templates for more details about carbon s generics see their design in addition to easy and powerful interop with c carbon templates can be constrained and incrementally migrated to checked generics at a fine granularity and with a smooth evolutionary path memory safety safety and especially memory safety remains a key challenge for c and something a successor language needs to address we plan to support a two step migration process highly automated minimal supervision migration from c to a dialect of carbon designed for c interop and migration incremental refactoring of the carbon code to adopt memory safe designs patterns and apis we also want to address important low hanging fruit in the safety space immediately when migrating into carbon tracking uninitialized states better increased enforcement of initialization and hardening against initialization bugs when needed designing fundamental apis and idioms to support dynamic bounds checking switching from undefined behavior to erroneous behavior wherever possible and marking the remaining undefined behavior with visible unsafe syntax having a default debug build mode that has less runtime overhead while being more comprehensive than existing c debug build modes combined with address sanitizer for more details see our safety design getting started to try out carbon immediately in your browser you can use the toolchain at carbon compiler explorer com we are developing a traditional toolchain for carbon that can compile and link programs however carbon is still an early experimental project and so we only have very experimental nightly releases of the carbon toolchain available to download and only on limited platforms if you are using a recent ubuntu linux or similar debian wsl etc you can try these out by going to our releases page and download the latest nightly toolchain tar file carbon_toolchain 0 0 0 0 nightly yyyy mm dd tar gz then you can try it out a variable with the nightly version from yesterday version date d yesterday 0 0 0 0 nightly y m d get the release wget https github com carbon language carbon lang releases download v version carbon_toolchain version tar gz unpack the toolchain tar xvf carbon_toolchain version tar gz create a simple carbon source file echo import core library io fn run core print 42 forty_two carbon compile to an object file carbon_toolchain version bin carbon compile output forty_two o forty_two carbon install minimal system libraries used for linking note that installing gcc or g for compiling c c code with gcc will also be sufficient these are just the specific system libraries carbon linking still uses sudo apt install libgcc 11 dev link to an executable carbon_toolchain version bin carbon link output forty_two forty_two o run it forty_two as a reminder the toolchain is still very early and many things don t yet work please hold off on filing lots of bugs we know many parts of this don t work yet or may not work on all systems we expect to have releases that are much more robust and reliable that you can try out when we reach our 0 1 milestone if you want to build carbon s toolchain yourself or are thinking about contributing fixes or improvements to carbon you ll need to install our build dependencies clang lld libc and check out the carbon repository for example on debian or ubuntu update apt sudo apt update install tools sudo apt install clang libc dev libc abi dev lld download carbon s code git clone https github com carbon language carbon lang cd carbon lang then you can try out our toolchain which has a very early stage compiler for carbon build and run the toolchain s help to get documentation on the command line scripts run_bazelisk py run toolchain help for complete instructions including installing dependencies on various different platforms see our contribution tools documentation learn more about the carbon project project goals language design overview carbon toolchain faq conference talks carbon focused talks from the community 2026 carbon memory safety a first deep dive july 10 video transcript slides benchmarking and optimizing the carbon compiler ndc toronto may 5 8 video slides carbon graduating from the experiment ndc toronto may 5 8 video slides 2025 carbon from c to memory safety rebase icfp splash slides memory safety everywhere with both carbon and rust rustconf video slides 2024 generic impl...