language-guide.md

title	Language Guide
section	Guide
order	2
description	A complete reference to silt's features: pattern matching, types, traits, closures, concurrency, and error handling.

Silt Language Guide

Silt is a statically-typed, expression-based programming language with full immutability, pattern matching as the sole branching construct, and CSP-style concurrency. File extension: .silt.

This guide is split into focused pages:

Language Features

• Bindings and Functions -- let, fn, closures, trailing closures, early return
• Types -- primitives, enums, generics, records, tuples, recursive types, type ascription
• Generics -- type parameters, constraints, bounded polymorphism, type-directed dispatch
• Pattern Matching -- match, literals, constructors, tuples, records, lists, maps, or-patterns, guards, ranges, pin, when/else, exhaustiveness
• Error Handling -- Result, Option, ? operator, when let-else, Never type
• Collections -- lists, maps, sets
• Loops, Pipes, and Other Features -- pipe operator, string interpolation, loop expression, ranges, comments
• Operators and Precedence -- full operator table, precedence, associativity, newline rules
• Traits -- declaration, implementation, Self type, built-in traits, where clauses
• Modules -- file-based modules, imports, built-in modules, standard library
• Testing -- test runner, assertions, file and function conventions

Design

• Design Decisions -- trade-offs and rationale behind language choices

Other Guides

• Concurrency -- CSP model, tasks, channels, select, fan-out patterns
• Strict-effects migration guide -- enabling --strict-effects to enforce effect annotations on user functions