Welcome to the Wing Language! 👋

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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).

Our mission 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 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.

We fulfill our mission by reducing cognitive load and increasing iteration speeds. How? by enabling you to work at a higher level of abstraction, letting you focus on business logic instead of cloud mechanics, and write much less code. 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 Monada and an amazing community of contributors (also known as Wingnuts).

Why do we think the cloud needs a programming 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 is 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 to JavaScript and executed on 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.addConsumer(inflight (message: str) => {
  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.addConsumer() 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.

Very cool, but what here cannot be done by a library or compiler extension?

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. You are welcome to read more about it here (including code samples that show the same app built in Wing vs. other solutions).

What makes Wing a good fit for cloud development? 🌟

Wing was built from the ground up to make it an ideal choice 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 config or runtime (preflight and inflight).
Higher level of cloud abstraction with a standard library of cloud resources that lets you write cloud portable code.
Compiler plugins that keep you in control by allowing you to customize the compilation output, such as infrastructure definitions.
Use any resource in the Terraform ecosystem as first-class citizen in your app.
JavaScript interoperability.
Distributed computing primitives.
Automatic generation of IAM policies and other cloud mechanics based on intent.
Local functional simulaor with a visualization and interaction console - used for testing and debugging with instant hot-reloading.
Native JSON and schema validation support.
Default immutability.
Implicit async, explicit defer.

For a more in-depth look at Wing's features and benefits, check out our documentation.

Getting started 🛠️

🚧 Wing is still in alpha, and not recommended for production use. But we're excited for anyone to take part in shaping our roadmap and contributing in any way. Our project status page includes more information about stability and roadmap.

You can install Wing in a few simple steps:

Check out the Prerequisites.
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!

FAQs ❓

Here are some questions we're commonly asked that are covered by our FAQ:

Community 💬

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.

Contributing 🤝

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. We appreciate your support and look forward to learning and building together.

We are incredibly grateful to our entire community for contributing bug fixes and improvements:

License 📜

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)! 🌤️🚀

grifhammer/wing