Turn: A Language for Agentic Computation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08755v1
• Date: Sat, 07 Mar 2026 09:10:09 GMT
• Title: Turn: A Language for Agentic Computation
• Abstract summary: We present textbfTurn, a compiled, actor-based programming language.<n>Turn is for agentic software: programs that reason and act autonomously by delegating inference to large language models.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We present \textbf{Turn}, a compiled, actor-based programming language -- statically typed for schema inference, dynamically typed at the value level -- for agentic software: programs that reason and act autonomously by delegating inference to large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches augment general-purpose languages with frameworks, encoding critical invariants (bounded context, typed inference output, credential isolation, durable state) as application-level conventions rather than language guarantees. Turn introduces five language-level constructs that address this gap. \emph{Cognitive Type Safety} makes LLM inference a typed primitive: the compiler generates a JSON Schema from a struct definition and the VM validates model output before binding. The \emph{confidence operator} enables deterministic control flow gated on model certainty. Turn's \emph{actor-based process model}, derived from Erlang, gives each agent an isolated context window, persistent memory, and mailbox. A \emph{capability-based identity system} returns opaque, unforgeable handles from the VM host, ensuring raw credentials never enter agent memory. Finally, \emph{compile-time schema absorption} (\texttt{use schema::<protocol>}) synthesizes typed API bindings from external specifications at compile time; the \texttt{openapi} adapter is shipped with \texttt{graphql}, \texttt{fhir}, and \texttt{mcp} in active development. We describe the language design, type rules, schema semantics, and a Rust-based bytecode VM, and evaluate Turn against representative agentic workloads. Turn is open source at https://github.com/ekizito96/Turn.

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