The standard library

Three modules, written in ordinary Luce and embedded in the compiler — the way Zig ships lib/std with its compiler, minus the install path. Wherever the compiler runs, import std.math just works. There is no package manager, no search path and nothing to install.

Because they are ordinary modules, standard code obeys every language rule: the ownership model, the checked arithmetic, and the host gate. import std.files inside a program compiled without host access is a compile error, because file access genuinely does not exist there.

Naming follows the language's own style. Modules are short lower-case nouns and functions are short verbs read with the module prefix — files.read(path), math.seed(42) — so bare names stay short without colliding.

Two constraints, deliberate for now#

No module state. A top-level let is a compile-time constant, so a module cannot hold a mutable global. Where state is genuinely needed the idiom is to hand it to the caller: math.seed(42) returns a List(Int) the caller owns, and mutation through a borrow is ordinary Luce.

Absence and failure are told apart. A function that may find nothing answers T?; one that may fail says !. files is written that way throughout, and math's five whole-array reductions answer Float? because an empty array has no mean.

Adding a module#

The repository's rule is four steps: write src/luce/std/NAME.luc as ordinary Luce, add one row to the table that embeds it, prove it in the spec suite, and document it.