Language reference#

What the language guarantees, construct by construct. Each page groups a family of constructs and every entry has its own link, so you can point at #match rather than at the whole page.

This is not where you learn to program in Vesta: that is Learn. This is where you find out which forms a construct admits, what it guarantees and which execution modes it exists in.

• Lexical structure
• Types
• Expressions and operators
• Statements
• Declarations
• Memory and ownership
• Errors and absence
• Concurrency
• Contracts and annotations
• Compile-time execution
• Preprocessor
• Inline assembly
• Interoperability
• Overlays
• Grammar

What is not here#

How the compiler does it is not covered here. That a constant is computed at build time rather than at run time is a compiler decision and lives in Compiler Internals; what this section states is what value that constant has, which is the part that does not change between releases.

Library types are not here either. u256 is used like a number and adds with +, but it is not a compiler type: it is written in Vesta and imported. It lives in the Standard Library. The line matters because it is the project's thesis: much of what other languages ship in the compiler, Vesta ships in the library.