Geno Preview Program

Status: Preview (v0.5.0) — Geno is available for early evaluation, but the structured external beta program has not produced public participant metrics or a retrospective yet.

Overview

The Geno preview program is the pre-beta path for external developers to build real applications using Geno and report friction in the language, tooling, and documentation before v1.0.

Onboarding

Prerequisites

Python 3.10-3.13 installed
Familiarity with at least one statically typed language

Setup

For a published release:

pip install geno-lang
geno --version

For an unpublished checkout, clone the repository and run pip install -e . from its root.

First Steps

Create a project from a template:

geno init my-app --template cli    # CLI app
geno init my-app --template web    # Browser app
geno init my-app --template api    # Multi-module API
geno init my-app --template lib    # Reusable library

Run it:
```
cd my-app
geno run Main.geno
```
Run tests (example-based):
```
geno test .
```
Type-check:
```
geno check .
```

Build for deployment:

geno build Main.geno           # Browser app → dist/
geno compile Main.geno -o app.py  # CLI → Python

Resources

Language spec: spec.json (machine-readable)
LLM prompting guide: docs/llm-prompting.md
Deployment guides: docs/deploy/
Examples: examples/
Package search: geno search <query> (the public catalog starts empty)

Tracking

Metrics per Developer

Metric	How to Measure
Time to first successful build	Timestamp from `geno init` to first `geno run` with no errors
Template used	cli / web / api / lib
Bugs filed	GitHub issue count per developer
Bug triage time	Time from issue creation to first response
Deployed app	Did they produce a working deployable artifact?
Geno core patches needed	Did they require changes to the Geno compiler/runtime?

Bug Triage Goal

Preview bugs should be triaged promptly:

Label with preview-feedback
Assign severity (P0-P3)
Acknowledge in issue comments
Fix or document workaround

Feedback Template

Preview users should use this template when filing issues:

**What I tried:**
[Description of what you were trying to build/do]

**What happened:**
[Error message, unexpected behavior, or confusion]

**What I expected:**
[What should have happened]

**Template used:** cli / web / api / lib
**Geno version:** (output of `geno --version`)
**OS:** macOS / Linux / Windows

App Ideas for Preview Users

Suggested projects that exercise different language features:

Todo CLI (cli template) — CRUD operations, file persistence
Calculator (web template) — UI events, state management
Markdown previewer (web template) — String processing, rendering
JSON formatter (cli template) — Parsing, pretty-printing
Quiz game (web template) — State machine, scoring

Retrospective

Before promoting the preview to a public beta, produce a retrospective document covering:

What worked well — features, docs, or tooling that developers praised
Pain points — ranked list of friction points
Bugs found — categorized by severity and component
Missing features — what developers asked for that doesn't exist
Documentation gaps — where developers got stuck
Prioritized findings for v1.0 — ordered list of must-fix items

Timeline

Phase	Duration	Activities
Recruitment	1 week	Identify and invite developers
Onboarding	1 week	Setup, first project, initial feedback
Building	2 weeks	Developers build apps, file bugs
Retrospective	1 week	Collect feedback, write findings

Rendered from docs/preview-program.md in the Geno repository.