Introduction

Attention

The new Clio version isn’t production ready yet, it is not even in beta stage. Things might break or not work as expected, if you encounter any issues like that please let us know so we can fix them as soon as we can.

Clio is a new programming language that compiles to JavaScript, although Clio tries to stay as close as possible to JavaScript, mainly for performance reasons, it doesn’t mean Clio is just JavaScript in new clothes. Clio requires its own runtime and standard libraries, including but not limited to lazy data types, built-in libraries, event emitters, serializers, network-based foreign function interface and the remote procedure ecosystem. Clio introduces a unique syntax, a new way of doing things and revolutionary programming concepts.

As for syntax, Clio isn’t a free-form language, that means spaces have meanings in the language syntax. Clio is a noise-free language, that means most of the common symbols found in other languages are not present in Clio, as an example, functions aren’t called by braces in Clio and arguments aren’t separated by a comma. Being expressive is key. We want to let the programmers do more while writing less.

Clio allows to easily chain functions together with flexibility without losing readability, these function calls aren’t nested inside each other and they’re read and run in same direction as they’re written, from left to right and not from inner to outer. This way of chaining functions is called a flow in Clio, a flow starts with some data, then is followed by on or more function names or function calls each operating after one another on the data.

All functions have a parallel version in Clio, they’re isolated but not free of side-effects, Clio provides tools to host these functions, export them, import them and use them in any other place in any language. It is also possible to import function from other languages over network, a feature we’re still working on. With the network-based foreign function interface you’ll be able to use most of the modules of any other programming language with ease.

This document assumes you are familiar with JavaScript, as Clio is at experimental stages of its development this documentation targets current JavaScript developers, but it should be easy to pickup if you’re familiar with some other language that isn’t JavaScript.This article also assumes you have installed Clio and you have a working Clio installation. If not, please follow the install instructions here. If you’re not ready yet to install Clio, you can always use our playground.