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Welcome to the Cogent wiki!

What is Cogent?

Cogent is a restricted, polymorphic, higher-order and purely functional language with linear types and without the need for a trusted runtime or garbage collector.

In the context of Cogent, the adjectives above, mean the following:

• restricted: Cogent omits certain features that one might come to expect from a programming language. For instance, Cogent doesn’t support general recursion.
• polymorphic: This is similar to templates in C++ or generics in Rust.
• higher-order: Cogent uses software components like functions, modules or objects as values.
• purely functional: Cogent forbids changing state, mutable data. Evaluation is done similar to a mathematical function.
• linear types: ‘Objects'(Here object is used to very broadly define instances/variable of a particular type) can be used exactly once.
• trusted runtime: Cogent compiler generates C code, so the trusted component is limited to the C runtime system.
• garbage collector: Since Cogent compiler generates C code, we would manage memory manually, like we do in any C program.