Architecture Overview

Equis is designed to provide strict, compile-time enforcement of the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) accounting model while maintaining the performance characteristics of a systems programming language.

1. Core Model

Equis shifts the correctness burden from runtime dynamic checks to compile-time structural validation. The architecture enforces three distinct tiers: - Agents: Immutable entity definitions holding roles and cryptographically verifiable identifiers. - Resources: State machines defining fractional, quantifiable assets tied strictly to internal fixed-point representations. - Events: The only mechanisms capable of mutating Resource states. Events are strictly typed workflows that execute balanced flows between Agents.

2. Compilation Pipeline

The Equis compiler (eq) operates as a multi-stage offline AOT (Ahead-of-Time) compiler.

2.1 Lexing and Parsing

The front-end compiler, self-hosted in Equis, executes a recursive-descent parser. It generates an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) optimized for financial domain semantics. High-order structures like Commitment and Policy are parsed into dedicated AST nodes directly.

2.2 Semantic Analysis (REA Validation)

The semantic phase executes duality verification. It ensures that every flow defined in an Event maintains a balanced input/output ratio according to the predefined Valuator or Policy parameters. If a flow definition violates the balancing rules, the analyzer rejects the compilation.

2.3 LLVM IR Generation

The backend utilizes the LLVM compiler infrastructure. Equis ASTs are mapped to LLVM IR (Intermediate Representation), translating high-level REA semantics into low-level C-ABI compatible functions. Fixed-point arithmetic operations are lowered to raw 64-bit ALU instructions, utilizing a constant scaling factor of 1,000,000 for all fractional resource calculations.

3. Memory Model

Equis provides two memory management strategies: - Automatic Reference Counting (ARC): The runtime uses calloc-based allocation with a reference-count header prepended to each object. The compiler emits sys_retain and sys_release calls at copy, assignment, and scope-exit points to automatically manage object lifetimes without a tracing garbage collector. - Arena Allocator (std/arena.equis): A library-level linear bump-pointer allocator available for deterministic, fragmentation-free allocation within bounded scopes such as event processing.

4. Self-Hosting Framework

The core Equis compiler resides entirely within compiler/main.equis alongside its component tree (lexer.equis, parser.equis, codegen.equis). The toolchain is fully self-bootstrapping and requires no external high-level compilers for production builds.