kavak is an embeddable frontend toolkit for language implementations. It provides C building blocks for source mapping, tokenization, Pratt-style expression parsing, AST storage, type arenas, diagnostics, and lightweight semantic analysis.

The public contract lives in include/kavak.h. The project is still pre-1.0, so API and ABI may change while the descriptor surface settles.

• Borrowed source buffers with line/column mapping
• Descriptor-driven lexer configuration for identifiers, numbers, strings, comments, operators, indentation, and automatic semicolons
• Token vectors, diagnostic vectors, and span utilities
• Pratt expression parser plus recursive-descent helper APIs
• Arena-backed AST and type allocation
• Scope, symbol lookup, narrowing, and name-resolution helpers
• Native and WASM-oriented static library builds

#include <kavak.h>
#include <my_language.h>

extern const KavakLanguage MY_LANGUAGE;

KavakSession *session = kavak_session_new(&MY_LANGUAGE);
KavakResult *result = kavak_analyze_bytes(session, bytes, len, "main.kv");

if (result) {
  for (uint32_t i = 0; i < kavak_error_count(result); ++i) {
    fprintf(stderr, "%u:%u: %s\n",
            kavak_error_line(result, i),
            kavak_error_col(result, i),
            kavak_error_message(result, i));
  }
  kavak_result_free(result);
}

kavak_session_free(session);

• include/kavak.h — public API
• src/ — implementation
• tests/ — unit tests, sanitizer smoke, and benchmarks
• examples/ — runnable public-header examples
• vendor/ — vendored dependency metadata, when present

make
make test
make examples
make sanitize
make tsan
make wasm
make bench

The Unicode path depends on the sibling decoder library. Override the location with DECODER_ROOT=/path/to/decoder when needed.

• make test, make examples, make sanitize, and make tsan pass
• make wasm produces the WASM-oriented static archive
• install and pkg-config dry runs pass under DESTDIR
• public headers and examples compile without private include paths
• source comments contain no internal task markers or private project notes
• dependency and project licenses are present

MIT. See LICENSE.