SLIiksi

SLIiksi is a fictional programming language conceived for use in academic discussions about scalable and secure language design for distributed systems. It is not a real-world product, but a teaching tool intended to illustrate how language features interact with resource management, safety, and concurrency in a distributed setting.

SLIiksi emphasizes resource awareness through a system of linear and affine types to prevent inadvertent aliasing and to guide safe handling of scarce resources such as file handles and network connections. It adopts a capability-based security model, where access to resources is mediated by explicit capabilities rather than by implicit privileges. The concurrency model is message-based, inspired by actor systems, with strong isolation between isolated components while allowing controlled sharing of durable state.

The syntax and semantics are designed to be approachable for students familiar with both functional and imperative programming. It provides explicit annotations for effects and lifetimes, and supports both functional style expressions and procedural constructs for managing remote operations. The language aims to make trade-offs between expressiveness, performance, and safety visible in the type system and runtime.

In practice, SLIiksi remains a hypothetical construct used in coursework and theoretical papers. There is no widely adopted compiler or toolchain. Nevertheless, it is often cited in discussions of distributed language design as a concrete example of how linear types, capabilities, and distributed references can be integrated into a modern language concept.