Nitpick Documentation

Welcome to the official developer documentation repository for the Nitpick programming language.

Nitpick is a modern systems programming language built from the ground up for formal correctness, deterministic memory safety without a garbage collector, zero undefined behavior, and high-performance out-of-process legacy interoperability.

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Documentation Guides

1. Quick Start Guide

• Prerequisites, LLVM toolchain dependencies (llc, ld.lld).
• Writing your first canonical "Hello World" application.
• Compiling via the automated runner harness vs. direct CLI commands.
• Core language rules for beginners (pub func:main, pub func:failsafe, Result<T> propagation).

2. Language Cheat Sheet

• Complete 19-level operator precedence table.
• First-class wrapping arithmetic (+%, -%, *%), error escalation (?!, _~, _^), and memory claims ($$i, $$m).
• Bit-precise scalar types (int8..int4096), fixed-point/rationals (frac, tbb, tfp), and runtime containers (Handle, arena, atomic, Result, Bridge).
• Declarations, modifiers, verification clauses (never fails, requires, ensures), and compiler intrinsics (NitpickAlloc).

3. Out-of-Process Driver Model & Bridge Guide

• Architectural motivation: why in-process FFI is unsafe and how supervised isolation prevents memory corruption.
• Wire Protocol v3: control socket (fd 3) and sealed shared memory ring buffer (NPKDRV03).
• Writing C drivers using the sdk/npkdrv.h header.
• Consuming drivers in Nitpick via extern:"driver" and asynchronous await.
• Fault containment: intercepting C segfaults as EDriverFault while keeping the host runtime alive.

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Editor Support

Official syntax highlighting, bracket matching, and code snippets for Antigravity IDE and VSCode are available in the vscode-nitpick extension.