Foreword

Auto was born from a simple question: what would a programming language look like if it were designed from the ground up to be written with AI, not just by humans?

The answer is a language that strips away ceremony, eliminates entire classes of bugs at compile time, and makes concurrency as natural as writing sequential code. Auto borrows hard-won lessons from Rust—ownership, move semantics, zero-cost abstractions—while removing the annotation burden that makes those concepts explicit in Rust. In Auto, the compiler handles lifetimes, borrowing, and resource cleanup automatically through the AutoFree system.

But Auto is more than "Rust with less syntax." Its is/has/spec type system offers a fresh take on inheritance, composition, and polymorphism. Its Actor-based concurrency model, built around task and mailbox, makes data races physically impossible by design. And its #[] comptime system brings metaprogramming into the language itself, without the complexity of procedural macros.

This book is structured after The Rust Programming Language, one of the finest programming language books ever written. We follow the same chapter progression so that readers familiar with Rust can map their knowledge directly. Code examples are presented in both Auto and Rust, highlighting the correspondence between the two languages.

Welcome to Auto.

• The Auto Language Team