chemical.mod

The chemical.mod file is the fundamental unit of project configuration in Chemical. While build.lab is for complex build orchestration, chemical.mod is used to define simple modules and their immediate dependencies.

Structure of chemical.mod

A typical chemical.mod consists of three main parts: module name, source directories, and imports.

# Define the name of this module
module my_module

# Specify where the .ch source files are located
source "src"

# Import other modules this project depends on
import std
import fs
import my_other_lib

Keyword Reference

• module <name>: (Required) Sets the name of the module. This name is used by others when they import your project.
• source <path>: Adds a directory to be scanned for .ch files. You can have multiple source lines.
• import <module_name>: Tells the compiler to make the public symbols of another module available to this one.
• export <module_name>: Similar to import, but also makes the symbols of that module available to anyone who imports your module (transitive dependency).

No Top-Level Imports

One of the unique features of Chemical is that you never write import at the top of a .ch file. If you have two files a.ch and b.ch in the same module, they can see each other's public symbols automatically. If you import std in chemical.mod, all files in your project can see std::string, std::vector, etc., immediately.