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This is the first step to having Clang's runtime libraries fully available for the Carbon toolchain. This PR focuses on the lowest level runtimes, the CRT files and the builtins library. The goal is to intercept Clang runs where it needs these target-dependent pieces to be available, and build them on demand using our Clang-running infrastructure. This avoids most of the subprocess overhead, but there is still some due to missing features in Clang. This requires exporting the sources for these runtimes from the Bazel build, and installing them in our target-independent resource directory. We then build a simplified "build" of these sources within the `ClangRunner` itself to produce the specific artifacts and layout expected by Clang. It also required fixing our use of Clang on macOS to have a default system root in order to successfully compile or link. It also required cleaning up how the `ClangRunner` used target information more generally -- instead of taking the target as a constructor parameter, it manages its target internally and relies on the Clang target-specifying command line flags. I looked at whether we could split this into another layer separate from the `ClangRunner`, but that proved frustratingly difficult to manage. While we support building these on-demand as part of a detected link, that doesn't seem feasible as we don't have the necessary separation between compilation runs of Clang and link runs of Clang. However, I have tried to factor the internals to provide as clear of separation as I could across these. I have also created a stand-alone subcommand to directly build the runtimes which allows for easy testing. It also supports building them into a specific directory, and that directory can in turn be passed to a Clang invocation. This is designed to work both at the API level with `ClangRunner` and at the subcommand level. Currently, the only part of the commandline that is detected and forwarded to the runtimes build is the target. Eventually, the plan is to expand this so that we can build a maximally tailored set of runtimes for a given compilation. The other big TODO here is to actually implement caching storage of these runtimes so they aren't built on every execution. Right now, this uses a somewhat hack-y build of a temporary directory, but this isn't expected to be suitable long-term. Building these runtimes on *every* link makes those commands take approximately 15 seconds with an ASan build like our default development build, and just over 2 seconds in an optimized build. Because of this, I've kept all of this disabled by default for now. The goal is that once caching and some other improvements land, we can enable this by default. --------- Co-authored-by: Jon Ross-Perkins <jperkins@google.com> Co-authored-by: Richard Smith <richard@metafoo.co.uk>
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.
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
unsafesyntax. - 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:
Conference talks
Carbon focused talks from the community:
2024
- Generic implementation strategies in Carbon and Clang, LLVM Developers' Meeting (video, slides)
- The Carbon Language: Road to 0.1, NDC {TechTown} (video, slides)
- How designing Carbon with C++ interop taught me about C++ variadics and overloads, CppNorth (video, slides)
- Generic Arity: Definition-Checked Variadics in Carbon, C++Now (video, slides)
- Carbon: An experiment in different tradeoffs, panel session, EuroLLVM (video, slides)
- Carbon's high-level semantic IR lightning talk, EuroLLVM (video)
2023
- Carbon’s Successor Strategy: From C++ interop to memory safety, C++Now (video, slides)
- Definition-Checked Generics, C++Now
- Modernizing Compiler Design for Carbon’s Toolchain, C++Now (video, slides)
2022
- Carbon Language: Syntax and trade-offs, Core C++ (video, slides)
- Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++, CppNorth (video, slides)
Other videos
We additionally have toolchain videos.
Join us
We'd love to have folks join us and contribute to the project. Carbon is committed to a welcoming and inclusive environment where everyone can contribute.
- Most of Carbon's design discussions occur on Discord.
- To watch for major release announcements, subscribe to our Carbon release post on GitHub and star carbon-lang.
- See our code of conduct and contributing guidelines for information about the Carbon development community.
Contributing
You can also directly:
- Contribute to the language design: feedback on design, new design proposal
- Contribute to the language implementation
- Carbon Toolchain, and project infrastructure
You can check out some
"good first issues",
or join the #contributing-help channel on
Discord. See our full
CONTRIBUTING documentation for more details.