Alechi will be a language that compiles to C. Its goal is to provide roughly all of C's features and some more, with a better type system and some syntactic sugar.

• A module system similar to ML's, with separate interface and implementation files (yes it will have headers). Bindings private to a module should probably still be callable, but they should output a warning.

• ML functors? (so that a program could e.g. define its custom allocator for the functions in the standard library).

• No dependency on the C standard library or any other C library. Output pure C with no GCC extensions.

• External C functions would not be directly callable, but would have to be declared in a module without implementation.

• Syntax should be a mix of C, ML, ReasonML, Jai. Curly braces, semicolons and snake_case everywhere. Modules and ADTs PascalCased.

• Extend the ML type system with type classes, either similar to OCaml (modular implicits) or Ur/Web (normal values). The language would make heavy use of these for e.g. testing equality, arithmetic, iterating, casts...

• Use modular implicits for allocating and deallocating structures and memory with polymorphic alloc and free functions. C++ has something similar with allocators, Zig passes allocators to functions that need them.

• Optionally emit clang module maps for faster compilation.

• Keyword for explicit tail calls (become, jump...). (how would this even work in C)

• Different types of strings prefixed by a letter (e.g. b"foo"), maybe even user-definable.

Some stuff to read and research.

• https://clang.llvm.org/docs/Modules.html

• https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=301618.301665

• https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3136055
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFsnN4dFRZA

• http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.43.7510

• https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02796

• http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~jesse/pubs/alms/

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yVc5t-g-VU

The name is the italian spelling of the japanese nickname (Aleki) of Alexandrite from Houseki no Kuni (Land of the Lustrous). I have no excuse to name the language like this other than I like the character. And it's pretty googleable.