Design

These pages are designs for things slate has not got yet, written before the work so that the decisions are argued once and in one place. Nothing here describes the compiler as it stands today.

Their programs are not run. Every other page under docs/ is executed by the test suite, which is what makes it trustworthy; a design page shows syntax that does not compile yet, so its blocks carry no language tag and the harness reads none of them. A page is rewritten as a reference page when the thing it describes is built, and the design page goes.

One page here is half built, and says so at the top: the VM struct is the ground the actors design stands on, so what has landed and what is still owed are written down together rather than split between a reference page and a plan.