Whale toolchain

What Whale is

Whale is a separate low-level toolchain written in Rust. It provides reusable assembly, object, linking, and intermediate-representation components for Wave and other native-code producers.

Whale is not the name of the entire Wave developer experience. The projects have distinct responsibilities:

Project	Responsibility
wavec	Validate and compile Wave source, generate artifacts, and coordinate native linking.
Vex	Manage Wave packages, manifests, dependency graphs, lockfiles, and package builds.
Whale	Develop independent low-level assembler, object, linker, and IR components.
Wave std	Provide Wave source modules for runtime and system APIs.

Components

The Whale workspace is organized into four main library areas:

• assembler: tokenization, AMD64 parsing and encoding, sections, symbols, and relocations
• object: an object-file model and ELF64 writer
• linker: link planning and executable-construction components
• ir: Whale IR types, builders, printing, verification, and an optional frontend socket

The whale executable exposes these areas as asm, object, link, and ir commands.

Tool boundaries

wavec and Whale are independent command-line tools. Installing or invoking Whale does not change a wavec build.

Vex sends package build plans to wavec; it does not forward Whale options. Invoke each tool through its own command-line interface.

Choosing the command

Use whale asm --amd64 to assemble AMD64 source into an ELF64 relocatable object. Use whale object to wrap raw bytes in an ELF64 object. The IR socket command is available in builds that enable socket-cli. Use the platform linker or wavec for an executable build, and validate generated objects with the object-format tools used by your target platform.