Documentation

Clef is a concurrent systems language in the ML family, targeting heterogeneous compute — CPU, GPU, NPU, FPGA — through a single coherent type system. These documents cover the language from first principles through compiler implementation.

Guides are the starting point. They describe the current state of the project and will expand into installation, setup, and tutorial content as the toolchain matures.

Reference covers the tools and infrastructure of the Clef ecosystem: the Composer build system, ClefPak package manager, and the assembly model that connects them.

Design Rationale explains why Clef works the way it does — the research, trade-offs, and prior art behind decisions in the memory model, type system, and concurrency architecture.

Compiler Internals documents how Composer is built: the nanopass pipeline, MLIR integration, hypergraph-based optimization, and backend code generation for native and embedded targets.

The language specification is maintained separately and defines Clef’s semantics in normative detail.