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.

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.

Tooling covers the developer-facing surface of the Clef ecosystem: the Lattice language server, autocomplete, the ClefPak package manager, and source-level dependency resolution.

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