🧩 Swamp VM Layout

Overview

This crate is responsible for mapping high-level Swamp language types to their low-level memory representations for the Swamp ABI. It serves as a crucial bridge between the abstract type system defined in swamp-types and the concrete memory layouts needed by the ABI.

Purpose

The swamp-layout crate:

• Computes memory layouts for all Swamp types, determining their size, alignment, and field offsets

• Handles type lowering by mapping high-level types to their concrete memory representations

• Manages memory layout deduplication for structurally identical types

• Ensures proper alignment and memory padding according to Swamp ABI requirements (similar to C ABI, but with special handling for zero size structs)

Key Components

LayoutCache

The core structure that manages type layout information with two primary caches:

• id_to_layout: Maps TypeId to BasicTypeRef, containing one entry per unique TypeId

• kind_to_layout: Maps TypeKind to BasicTypeRef, enabling sharing layouts between structurally identical types

Layout Functions

The crate provides specialized layout functions for different type categories:

• Primitive types (integers, floats, booleans, strings)
• Composite types (structs, tuples)
• Sum types (enums, optional types)
• Collection types (vectors, maps, grids)
• Collection views

Usage

This crate is primarily intended for use within the Swamp compiler toolchain and VM implementation, usually not for direct use by Swamp language users.

[dependencies]
swamp-layout = "0.0.1"

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Contribution

We do not accept contributions. You are however welcome to:

• Utilize and fork the codebase according to the MIT license terms
• Identify and report any issues through the issue tracker
• Offer constructive feedback and suggestions
• Help others discover the project

Should you encounter bugs or have enhancement ideas, please don't hesitate to open an issue. While I'm unable to accept contributions, your insights are valuable to the project's improvement.

I appreciate your understanding and interest in this work. 🙏

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2025 Peter Bjorklund. All rights reserved.