Wave documentation and learning guide

Learn Wave with this guide

Learn to write Wave source code, compile and run it, and check the results. If you are new to programming, follow the sequence below. If you know another language, run each chapter’s examples and compare its rules and boundary cases with what you already know.

Learning path

Step	Chapter	What you will learn
Setup	Installation	Prepare the compiler and standard library and verify that they run
1	Your first program	Create, check, and run a source file and understand exit codes
2	Variables and types	Store values and choose types with the required range
3	Operators and conversions	Explain evaluation order and the results of type conversions
4	Conditions and loops	Branch on conditions and process data with loops
5	Functions	Extract repeated operations into functions
6	Arrays	Access elements by index and iterate over an array
7	Strings	Distinguish characters from bytes and understand escapes and string length
8	Structs and variants	Group related data and represent success and failure
9	Pointers and lifetimes	Modify the original value through its address and manage its lifetime
10	Dynamic memory	Handle allocation failures and free memory
11	Modules and generics	Split code across files and reuse functions with different types
12	Error handling	Check results and clean up resources on failure
13	Introduction to asynchronous code	Create a Future and wait for it to finish

Put your knowledge into practice

After the core chapters, build an input calculator, a file reader, a binary message, and a TCP client. Test both successful input and failure cases in each project.

Three documentation tabs

• Wave: A guided language course and practical projects to follow in order.
• Standard library: Each module’s APIs, return values, errors, ownership rules, and platform requirements.
• Whale: Building and linking, package management, command usage, and the low-level toolchain.

Examples distinguish complete programs from snippets that belong inside a function. Run wavec commands in a terminal and save wave code blocks in .wave files. Input and output are shown separately; examples that read standard input specify what to enter.

When you get stuck

Use Troubleshooting to distinguish installation, source checking, linking, and execution problems. Look up language rules in the syntax quick reference, commands in the compiler reference, and APIs in the standard library guide.