A program's code is written in an .h64 text file, then translated by horsec to bytecode combined with HVM in various stages. The result is a mostly standalone executable.
Other tooling like horp helps with project management.
These are the current compilation stages of horsec as of 2023-11-02:
--stage token does tokenization.
--stage ast applies the AST parser for a syntax tree and computes a global scope, which can be output with --stage global-scope if desired.
--stage checked-ast processes all imports and applies the previous stages to them as well, and then does full project-wide symbol resolution to verify all symbol references.
--stage transformed-code takes the fully checked code and applies all concurrency transforms and the part of the optimizations that happen still on the AST tree level. You can alternatively output the corresponding AST via --stage transformed-ast if desired.
--stage bytecode will take the fully resolved and transformed AST and generate the resulting bytecode.
(Upcoming maybe at some point, more optimizations here.)
--stage binary will write out the bytecode binary representation attached to a VM binary.