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Bynk

Lay out a project

Goal: structure a multi-file project with source and tests, and build it.

A project is a directory containing a bynk.toml manifest and your .bynk files. The conventional layout keeps source and tests in sibling trees:

my-project/
├── bynk.toml
├── src/
│   ├── counters.bynk       # context counters
│   └── quantities.bynk     # commons quantities
└── tests/
    ├── counters.bynk       # suite counters
    └── quantities.bynk     # suite quantities

This is convention, not a rule. Test-ness is structural — a suite block is a test wherever it lives — so you can put tests beside the code they exercise, or even in the same file:

-- src/quantities.bynk — an atomic file: the commons and its tests together
commons quantities {
  fn double(n: Int) -> Int { n + n }
}


suite quantities {
  case "doubles" { expect double(3) == 6 }
}

When you build, the suite is stripped — never type-checked for the build, never emitted to the deployable — while bynkc test compiles and runs it. There is no .test.bynk suffix: every file is just .bynk, and the suite keyword is what marks a test.

The manifest

Section titled “The manifest”

bynk.toml names the project. Layout config is optional:

[project]
name = "my-project"
version = "0.1.0"


[paths]
# Both keys are optional. `include` defaults to the conventional roots that
# exist (`src`, and `tests` when present), or the project root itself — so a
# conventional or a flat project needs no `[paths]` at all.
exclude = ["vendor"]   # skip subtrees (monorepo, vendored, generated .bynk)

See the bynk.toml reference for every key. The tool always skips its own out/ and node_modules/ caches and dot-directories.

Path identity

Section titled “Path identity”

A source unit’s path must match its qualified name. A file declaring context counters must be counters.bynk; one declaring context commerce.orders must be commerce/orders.bynk (under an include root). A suite has no such requirement — it names its target, so it is legal in any file.

Source mismatches are reported as bynk.project.inconsistent_commons_name.

Build and test

Section titled “Build and test”
Terminal window
bynkc compile . --output out      # compile the project (suites stripped)
bynkc test .                      # compile and run the tests
bynkc check .                     # type-check only
Section titled “Related”