Type System

Clef’s type system is grounded in the Native Type Universe (NTU) — a unified representation that maps ML-family types directly to machine-native layouts without an intermediate managed runtime.

These articles cover the key decisions: how Clef’s intermediate language lowers into the NTU, how dimensional type safety extends across CPU and GPU execution models, and how by-reference semantics are resolved at the type level rather than deferred to runtime convention. Together, they explain how Clef preserves the expressiveness of algebraic types and type inference while producing the compact, predictable representations that systems programming demands.