Trelag

Trelag is a fictional programming language and runtime designed to explore safe parallelism and streaming data processing. It emphasizes deterministic execution, immutable data by default, and a modular ecosystem that supports both high-level expressions and low-level optimization.

Origin and naming: The term trelag blends tri- with lag, reflecting three core pillars: safety, scalability, and expressiveness.

Overview: Designed for learning environments and theoretical research, trelag presents a simplified model of ownership and effects, enabling static analysis to prevent data races.

Core features: It includes a static type system with a simple ownership model; explicit lifetimes; an effect system for input/output; built-in support for asynchronous streams; a small virtual machine and an ahead-of-time compiler; and interoperability with C libraries. The language aims to balance safety with performance, offering clear semantics for concurrency and data flow.

Syntax and semantics: Code in trelag emphasizes determinism and predictable scheduling. It provides constructs for task creation and synchronization, channels for message passing, and dataflow graphs that underpin streaming pipelines. The design favors readable abstractions while exposing sufficient control for low-latency applications.

Development and reception: Since its fictional inception in academic materials, trelag has not been released as a production language. It is used primarily in textbooks and teaching labs to illustrate concepts of safety in parallel programming, memory management, and streaming architectures, as well as to compare design choices across concurrent language ecosystems.

See also: Programming language, Concurrency, Dataflow programming.