Welcome to esque

esque is a statically typed, tensor-primitive systems language. The compiler esquec is written in Go and emits ELF x86-64 Linux executables directly — there is no LLVM dependency, and no runtime to link.

This site has two parts:

• Learn — the path you are on now. A guided tour, then a tutorial that teaches the language in the order you will actually meet ideas.
• Reference — the full, terse, definitive description of the language and the compiler internals. Useful once you know the basics and want to look something up.

If you have never used esque before, you want Learn.

What esque is

esque is built around three observations:

1. Tensors are not a library; they are values. A function takes f32[3, N] the same way it takes i32. Shapes are part of the type.
2. Loops over numeric data are almost always one of a few patterns: build a vector by index, run a prefix accumulator, iterate until a condition is met, reduce. esque gives those patterns names (tabulate, scan, iterate_until, +/ …) instead of for/while.
3. The compiler should be a single static binary you can read. No build-system rabbit hole; no MLIR, no LLVM, no runtime archive. Just parse → typecheck → CEIR → MIR → x86-64 → ELF.

A 10-second taste

fn dot[N](x: f32[N], y: f32[N]) -> f32 = +/(x .* y)

fn main() -> i32 = {
    let a = [1.0, 2.0, 3.0];
    let b = [4.0, 5.0, 6.0];
    let result = dot(a, b);          # 32.0
    result as i32                     # exit code 32
}

Compile and run:

$ ./esquec build hello.esq -o hello
$ ./hello; echo $?
32

+/ is reduce-sum. .* is element-wise multiplication. The shape N is inferred at the call site, so dot([1.0,2.0,3.0], [4.0,5.0,6.0]) specialises dot to dot__3 automatically.

Where to next

Brand new? Start with Install then Hello, world.

Already comfortable? Take the Tour, which fits the whole language on one page.

Want to look something specific up? Jump to the Reference.