enso/engine

The Enso Engine

The Enso engine is the codebase responsible for compiling and executing Enso code, as well as providing language server functionality to users of the language. It is subdivided into two major components:

• Runtime
• Language Server

Runtime

The Enso runtime is responsible for the actual execution of Enso code. This means that it encompasses the following functionality:

• Parsing: Taking Enso code as input and generating an AST that maintains a sophisticated set of information about the input.
• Desugaring: Reducing the user-facing Enso code into a simplified language known as Core.
• Type Inference: Inferring the types of bindings in the user's code.
• Type Checking: Checking that the inferred and provided types for bindings match up across the codebase.
• Optimisation: Static optimisation processes to improve the performance of the user's program.
• Code Execution: Actually running the Enso code.
• Introspection Hooks: Providing hooks into the running code to allow the language server to inspect information about the code as it runs.

Language Server

The Enso Language Server is responsibile for providing a remote-communication protocol for the runtime, exposing many of its features to the users. In addition it provides the backing service for much of the IDE functionality associated with the language. It encompasses the following functionality:

• Introspection Services: Giving clients the ability to observe information about their running code including values, types, profiling information, and debugging.
• Code Execution: The ability for clients to execute arbitrary Enso code in arbitrary scopes. This can be used in conjunction with the above to provide a REPL with an integrated debugger.
• Code Completion: Sophisticated completion functionality that refines suggestions intelligently based on context.
• Node Management: Tracking and providing the language server's internal node representation of the Enso program.
• Code Analysis: Analysis functionality for Enso code (e.g. find usages, jump-to-definition, and so on).
• Refactoring: Refactoring functionality for Enso code (e.g. rename, move, extract, and so on).
• Type Interactions: Features for type-driven-development that allow users to interact with the types of their programs.