Overview

Comline takes a schema you write by hand and carries it through a fixed pipeline:

parse → resolve imports → validate → freeze → generate

Each stage has its own page in this guide; this is the map.

1. Write a schema — IDL

A project is a directory with a package manifest (config.idp) and one or more .ids schema files under src/. The schema language defines structures, enums, protocols, errors and settings, with docstrings attached to any of them.

comline new my-api      # scaffold config.idp + comline.toml + src/main.ids

2. Compile to the Intermediate Representation

comline check parses, resolves imports and validates. comline build does that and then freezes the result: the schema becomes a set of immutable IR units written into a content-addressable store, .comline/, as a new commit in an append-only chain.

The package version bumps automatically on each build, by the largest change since the last one — see Versioning rules.

3. Generate code

comline generate turns the compiled schema into source for a target language. What languages a package supports is declared in config.idp; where the code lands and in what layout is the consumer's choice, in comline.toml. One schema history can be generated across several languages and several past versions at once.

4. Runtime

At run time a runtime library handles transport, message parsing and routing a protocol call to its implementation, over a pluggable call system (JSON-RPC, a compact binary framing, or your own).

Where things are owned

See Packages & dependencies for the manifest, and the Design section for the reasoning behind the split.