kohvis

Kohvis is a fictional programming language created to illustrate concepts of concurrency and dataflow programming in educational contexts. The project emphasizes readability, safety, and portability, aiming to give learners and researchers a concrete environment to experiment with parallelism without the complexities of low-level threading.

Design goals include a clean, approachable syntax, static typing with type inference, and a small, well-defined standard library. The language favors immutable data by default, with controlled mutability through explicit constructs to reduce data races.

Execution and concurrency: Kohvis uses an actor-style model. Lightweight processes communicate by asynchronous message passing. The runtime supports sandboxed isolation of components and deterministic scheduling in single- and multi-core environments.

Syntax and semantics: Kohvis features indentation-based syntax with elements reminiscent of ML-inspired languages and Kotlin-like readability. It supports algebraic data types, pattern matching, and first-class functions. The type system is sound but designed to be forgiving in common educational scenarios.

Tooling and ecosystem: A reference compiler and interactive interpreter are provided, along with a standard library that covers basic IO, collections, and concurrency primitives. An accompanying teaching syllabus and example projects are part of the distribution.

History and reception: Kohvis was developed by an international open-source community beginning in 2018, with the first stable release in 2020. It is primarily used in university courses and coding clubs to demonstrate concepts in a safe, controlled environment. While it is not intended for production-scale software, it has been praised for clarity and instructional value and criticized for limited ecosystem maturity and performance overhead in some benchmarks.