How to use the vilan language, its standard library, and the frameworks
built on top of it. If you’re wondering where something lives: this book
is about using vilan. Design history and rationale live in
vilan/proposal/.
Tour — the language itself, taught informally. Start with
Coming from JavaScript if that’s your
background, then read in order. Come back any time you need a syntax
reminder.
Guides — the frameworks, task by task: reactive state,
building UI, styling, routing, talking to a server. Each guide reads
front to back and links into the reference for exact signatures.
std reference — the standard library, signatures first.
Go here to answer “what were the parameters again?”.
Specification — the formal definition: grammar, type
rules, the memory model, execution. This is the advanced tier. The tour
teaches; the spec defines; where they disagree, the spec wins.
The book renders with mdBook:
mdbook serve vilan/docs gives a local live-reloading site with search
and a sidebar (cargo install mdbook once). Pushes to main publish it
to GitHub Pages automatically. Everything also reads fine as plain files
— the site adds navigation, it doesn’t replace the markdown.
Examples are complete programs unless explicitly labelled a fragment —
copy, vilan build, run.
Every example compiles as part of the test suite (cargo test --test docs): a fenced ```vilan block must compile for the node target,
```vilan,browser for the browser target, ```vilan,norun compiles
but needs external services to actually run, and ```vilan,fragment is
prose-only (used sparingly, always labelled).
Maintenance rule: a change to std, a framework, or the language updates the
affected docs page in the same commit.