This is the source code for the Morphic compiler.

What is Morphic?

Morphic is an experimental pure functional programming language designed to achieve performance competitive with imperative systems languages like C++ and Rust.

Morphic features three automatic optimizations which turn functional programming constructs into zero-cost abstractions:

• Lambdas: Morphic’s lambda set specialization makes lambdas unboxed and statically dispatched, and allows calls to lambdas to be inlined. You can find the details in our paper or talk.
• Immutable Data Structures: Morphic’s mutation optimization transforms updates to logically-immutable data structures into in-place mutations when doing so does not affect semantics.
• Automatic Memory Management: Morphic uses a borrow-based reference counting scheme which is able to eliminate almost all reference count increments and decrements for a large class of programs, see the paper for details.

type Primality {
  Prime,
  Composite,
}

sieve(limit: Int): Array Primality =
  // Array memory is automatically managed statically,
  // without any refcounting overhead in this case.
  let init_arr =
    Array.fill(limit, Prime)
    |> Array.set(0, Composite)
    |> Array.set(1, Composite)
  in
  // Iterator logic compiles to a simple loop, with
  // no heap allocations or virtual dispatch.
  Iter.range(2, limit)
  |> Iter.foldl(init_arr, \(arr, n) ->
    match Array.get(arr, n) {
      Prime ->
        Iter.ints(2)
        |> Iter.map(\i -> i * n)
        |> Iter.take_while(\i -> i < limit)
        |> Iter.foldl(
          arr,
          // Array updates logically copy the array,
          // but are automatically performed in-place
          // when safe.
          \(new, i) -> Array.set(new, i, Composite)
        ),
      Composite -> arr,
    }
  )

Getting Started

To build Morphic you will need an up-to-date Rust compiler and a development copy of LLVM 16. Appropriate LLVM packages are available on Debian and Ubuntu from the LLVM repository. On other platforms, you may need to build LLVM from scratch. See the LLVM docs for details. Once you have installed Rust and LLVM 16, simply run cargo build.

Syntax highlighting is available via the Morphic VSCode Extension.

Extra build options

Typically, you should not need any extra environment variables when building Morphic. However, Morphic's build process does depend on the presence of several command line tools, and we provide the option to explicitly specify their locations via:

• MORPHIC_CLANG_PATH