Introduction

You aren’t going to write it.

That motto is the whole design philosophy. Maxon assumes the AI writes the code, so the code has to answer for itself — the language optimizes for review, not keystrokes. Where other languages trade clarity for keystrokes, Maxon spends the keystrokes: constraints are stated, structure is named, and nothing is left implicit to puzzle out later.

Maxon is a compiled programming language with from-scratch native backends. It compiles directly to standalone native executables, and to WebAssembly — no LLVM, no virtual machine, and no external runtime.

Two things follow from the philosophy:

• It was written by AI. The compiler, the standard library, and this documentation were authored by AI coding agents. Maxon is a working demonstration of a complete toolchain — lexer, parser, type checker, optimizer, native code generator — built end-to-end by agents.
• It is designed to be checked. The same explicitness that makes code easy to review makes it hard to get wrong: there is no null, fallible operations must be resolved explicitly, numeric domain constraints live in the type system, and every block names what it closes.

What that buys you

The features that make Maxon legible to a model also make it quick to check by hand:

• No null. Fallible reads use try … otherwise, so there is no value you can forget to check.
• Ranged type aliases. typealias Port = int(0 to 65535) pushes a real bound into the type. A constant out of range is a compile error; a value computed at run time is checked, and an out-of-range one stops the program with a panic instead of wrapping around.
• Explicit block labels. while … 'iterate' … end 'iterate' makes structure unambiguous — no counting braces to find where a block ends.
• No silent failures and no implicit coercions. Code says what it does.
• Structured diagnostics. Errors carry stable codes — the exact signal an agent uses to read a failure and self-correct.

A first taste

typealias Port = int(0 to 65535)

function main() returns ExitCode
  let port = 8080 as Port
  print("listening on {port}\n")
  return 0
end 'main'

Every program has a main() that returns an ExitCode. String interpolation uses {}. The port value can only ever hold 0–65535, enforced by the compiler.

Where to go next

• Installation — install Maxon with one command.
• Your first program — a guided walk-through.
• A tour: building sort — a whole real program, read end to end.
• Language Reference — the complete language.