Introduction

Beef Overview

Beef is a performance-oriented statically-compiled programming language. The language and environment focus on developer productivity, and careful attention has been paid to the holistic pleasurability of developing, debugging, and maintaining Beef applications. The intended audience is the performance-minded developer who values simplicity, code readability, fast development iteration, and good debuggability.

Design goals

• High performance execution
  • No GC or ref counting overhead
  • Minimal runtime
  • Compiled (no JIT delays)
• Control over memory
  • Extensive support for custom allocators
  • Enhanced control over stack memory
• Low-friction interop with C and C++
  • Statically or dynamically link to normal C/C++ libraries
  • Support for C/C++ structure layouts and calling conventions
• Prefer verbosity over conciseness when it aides clarity, readability, or discoverability
• Enable fluid iterative development
  • Fast incremental compilation and linking
  • Runtime code compilation (code hot swapping), including data layout changes
• Familiar syntax and programming paradigms for intended audience (C-family)
• Good debugability
  • Emits standard debug information (PDB/DWARF)
  • Emphasis on good execution speed of debug builds
• Well-suited to IDE-based workflow
  • Compiler as a service
  • Fast and reliable autocomplete results
  • Fast and trustworthy refactorability (ie: renaming symbols)
• Leverage LLVM infrastructure
  • Battle-hardened backend optimizer
  • ThinLTO link time optimization support