Bootstrapping

[Malix-Labs]

Bootstrapping would be a nice milestone

https://bootstrappable.org/

[Malix-Labs]

#51 (comment)

@Ze7111 ?

[Ze7111]

This issue auto-closed due to timeout, but bootstrapping is very much alive. So far we've progressed:

completed

core

• SourceManager: location mapping, file reads, line tables
• VFM: chunking for 32-bit virtual buffers, memory-mapped file handling
• Location primitives: SourceRange, SourceLocation
• Memory mapping: MMapRegion, MemoryBuffer, page files
• Token system: TokenBuffer, Token (crazy sizeof(Token) is only 16bytes), TokenKind
• Memory management: ArenaAllocator, GlobalRecycler
• Threading: lock-free ThreadPool, SmallFunction

lexer

• Keywords, identifiers, numbers, strings, operators, whitespace handling
• ~200ns/token on M2 Pro
• Passes unit tests; approximately 75% of Stage 2 quality
• ThreadPool integration for hot path scheduling

unicode support

• UTF-8 decoding with SIMD optimization
• CharTable for character classification
• Wide character support

utilities

• String hashing (narrow and wide)
• HashState for incremental hashing
• Keyword lookup tables

build system

• cross platform scripts (batch, PowerShell, shell)
• Test harness with extraction and execution

---

In Progress

• Preprocessor (regular macros macro something!)
• Lexer refactoring (all token kinds parsing works, refactor is next)
• DiagnosticEngine @mbambav
• CLI Driver @OjasTalgaonkar

---

Status

Team is on winter break. Development resumes in January.
New name for the language and toolchain coming soon!

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@Malix-Labs appreciate the ping. Happy to answer questions.

[Ze7111]

Five months overdue on an update, apologies.

Status moves since January:

Renamed to Kairo. New repo, new everything.

Stage 1 (self-hosted compiler, written in Kairo) is at ~50k LOC / 133 files. Working subsystems:

• Lexer: ~150 MB/s on a 9950X3D2. UTF-8, f-strings, nested comments, git conflict marker detection
• Preprocessor: ~85 MB/s, three-phase wave-parallel on a custom thread pool
• Parser: CRTP mixins (ExprParse/StmtParse/DeclParse/TypeParse/AnnotParse), arena-allocated AST
• GlobalHoistedScope: thread-safe symbol table for parallel multi-TU indexing
• PrettyDiagConsumer: same-line coalescing, colored carets
• Driver: calling directly into LLVM's C++ API via Kairo's FFI

Stage 0 (C++ bootstrap) builds .k files into native binaries on macOS, Linux, Windows
Still to come: Sema in Stage 1, then codegen, then AMT (ownership/borrow story, designed, not implemented). Working alpha target mid to end 2026.

For the bootstrappable.org question: what is described above is self-hosting, not bootstrappable in the https://bootstrappable.org/ sense. Stage 0 produces C++ source and depends on whichever C++23 host compiler is available (GCC, Clang, MSVC all work), so that part isn't single-vendor-locked. Stage 1 is the hard dependency tale, the driver calls directly into LLVM's C++ API, and codegen will lower through LLVM IR, hence Stage 1 carries LLVM as a hard library dependency. Near-term milestone: self-hosting. Full source-bootstrap from minimal seed is a distinct (and much larger) endeavor we haven't scoped out. Open to input here if it’s a domain you have worked in, not something the team has deep knowledge on.

[Malix-Labs]

nice things

btw there are still a lot of remaining mentions of "helix" in the organization : https://github.com/search?q=org:kairolang+helix

[Ze7111]

nice things

btw there are still a lot of remaining mentions of "helix" in the organization : https://github.com/search?q=org:kairolang+helix

Yeah, its mostly lib-helix, it had too many cross deps that risked breaking if i had renamed it to lib-kairo, after stage1 is complete lib-helix is gone anyways... since it was only the corelib to allow stage0 to compile kairo code.

There is also mentions of Helix on the site, but its the old website not the new one, I'm making www.helix-lang.com redirect to the new webstie www.kairolang.org, and either archiving the old websites source or making it private.

Other than that, there's just a few file names that contain helix, I'm also renaming them now.

Thanks for pointing it out btw, would've not noticed all of it!