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Winglang is a new open-source programming language designed for the cloud (aka "cloud-oriented"). Wing enables developers to build distributed systems that leverage cloud services as first-class citizens by combining infrastructure and application code in a safe and unified programming model (aka "cloud-oriented"). Wing programs can be executed locally (yes, no internet required) using a fully-functional simulator, or deployed to any cloud provider (yes, Wing programs are portable across providers).
The mission of Winglang is to bring back your creative flow and close the gap between imagination and creation.
Developing for the cloud today requires mastering various layers of the cloud stack, IAM roles, networking, and numerous tools, along with finding creative ways to test and debug code. In addition, long deployment times hinder iteration cycles and take developers out of their creative flow.
Winglang addresses these pains by letting you work at a higher level of abstraction and allowing you to focus on business logic instead of cloud mechanics, only surfacing low-level details when it's needed. We also provide you with a set of tools that let you test your code locally, significantly faster than before.
Wing is built by Elad Ben-Israel, the guy behind the AWS CDK, the gang at the Wing Cloud team and an amazing community of contributors (also known as Wingnuts).
Click here to watch a short video introduction to the Wing language.
Cloud applications are fundamentally different from applications that run on a single machine - they are distributed systems that rely on cloud infrastructure to achieve their goals.
In order to be able to express both infrastructure and application logic in a safe and unified programming model, Winglang has two execution phases: preflight for infrastructure definitions and inflight for runtime code.
Preflight code is executed during compilation and produces the infrastructure configuration for your app (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation, etc). Inflight code is compiled into JavaScript and executed within cloud compute platforms in Node.js environments.
Let's look at a simple example:
bring cloud;
let queue = new cloud.Queue();
let counter = new cloud.Counter();
let bucket = new cloud.Bucket();
queue.setConsumer(inflight (message) => {
let i = counter.inc();
bucket.put("file-{i}.txt", message);
});cloud.Queue, cloud.Counter and cloud.Bucket are preflight objects.
They represent cloud infrastructure resources.
When compiled to a specific cloud provider, such as AWS, a Terraform file will be produced with the provider's implementation
of these resources. The queue.setConsumer() method is a preflight method that configures the infrastructure to
invoke a particular inflight function for each message in the queue.
Now comes the cool part: the code that runs inside the inflight function interacts with the counter and the bucket objects
through their inflight methods (counter.inc() and bucket.put()). These methods can only be
called from inflight scopes.
In existing languages, where there is no way to distinguish between multiple execution phases, it is impossible to naturally represent this idea that an object has methods that can only be executed from within a specific execution phase (or within certain scopes of the program). You are welcome to read more about it here (including code samples that show the same app built in Wing vs. other solutions).
Wing was built from scratch to make it easy for building applications on any cloud. It includes an assembly of different features that serve that purpose:
- Cloud services as first-class citizens, with phase modifiers for describing infrastructure and runtime code (
preflightandinflight). - Wing Cloud Library provides a standard set of resources that lets you write cloud portable code.
- Compiler plugins that keep you in control by allowing you to customize the infrastructure definitions and run policy checks.
- Use any resource in the Terraform ecosystem as first-class citizen in your app.
- JavaScript interoperability.
- Automatic generation of IAM policies and other cloud mechanics based on source code.
- Wing Console - a visual application-centric operations and management console, that lets you interact with...
- A simulator that can used for testing and debugging in milliseconds.
- JSON as a primitive data type with schema validation support for each conversion to and from structs.
- Immutability by default, implicit async code, and safety from nulls and undefined.
For a more in-depth look at Wing's features and benefits, check out our documentation.
🚧 This is a pre-release, please see our project status for more details.
If you'd just like to dip your feet in the water and see what Wing is all about, you can try it out in our online playground or walk through the interactive tour.
When you're ready to start building your own Wing apps, you'll need to:
- Install the Wing CLI.
- Get the Wing IDE Extension for your favorite editor.
- Launch the Wing Console and take it for a spin!
For a step-by-step guide, head over to our Getting Started guide. It's a once-in-a-lifetime adventure into the Wing rabbit hole!
Here are some questions we're commonly asked that are covered by our FAQ:
- Who is behind this project?
- Which clouds are supported by Wing?
- Which provisioning engines are supported by Wing?
Join our flock in the Wing Slack community. We're here to help each other, answer questions, and share our cloud adventures. Alternatively, post any questions on GitHub Discussions.
Want to help Wing take flight? Check out our contribution guide to learn how to set up a development environment and contribute to the project. You can also get started by opening the project in GitHub Codespaces.
We are incredibly grateful to our entire community for contributing bug fixes and improvements:
Wing is licensed under the MIT License. Contributions are made under our contribution license.
Happy coding, and remember: the sky's the limit with Wing (yes, another pun)! 🌤️🚀