Introduction

Almide is a programming language designed for a single metric: modification survival rate — the probability that an LLM-generated code change compiles and passes tests on the first attempt.

Core idea

Most programming languages optimize for human expressiveness. Almide optimizes for predictability. At every generation step, the set of valid next tokens is as small as possible. This means:

• One way to write it — no synonyms, no alternative syntax
• Types everywhere — every function signature is fully typed
• Effects are visible — effect fn marks side effects in the type
• No magic — no implicit conversions, no macros, no reflection

Multi-target compilation

Almide compiles to two targets from the same source, and they are guaranteed to behave identically:

Target	Use case
Native (via Rust)	Production binaries, system programming
WASM	Browser, edge computing, sandboxed execution

almide run app.almd                  # Compile + execute natively
almide run app.almd --target wasm    # Execute on wasmtime
almide build app.almd --target wasm  # Build a .wasm module

Same stdout, same stderr, same exit code on both — see WebAssembly.

Design principles

Principle	Definition
Predictable	The next valid syntax can be narrowed tightly at each step
Local	Understanding a function requires only nearby context
Repairable	Errors return near-unique fix candidates
Compact	High semantic density with low syntactic noise

What Almide looks like

import fs

// Pure function — no side effects
fn fibonacci(n: Int) -> Int =
  if n <= 1 then n
  else fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2)

// Type with variants (algebraic data type)
type Shape =
  | Circle(Float)
  | Rectangle(Float, Float)

fn area(s: Shape) -> Float =
  match s {
    Circle(r) => 3.14159 * r ^ 2,
    Rectangle(w, h) => w * h,
  }

// Effect function — can fail, can do I/O
effect fn read_config(path: String) -> Result[String, String] = {
  let content = fs.read_text(path)!
  ok(content)
}

Next steps

• Install Almide to start writing code
• Hello World for your first program
• Language Guide for a comprehensive tour