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+# ISLE: Instruction Selection/Lowering Expressions DSL
+
+ISLE is a DSL that allows one to write instruction-lowering rules for a
+compiler backend. It is based on a "term-rewriting" paradigm in which the input
+-- some sort of compiler IR -- is, conceptually, a tree of terms, and we have a
+set of rewrite rules that turn this into another tree of terms.
+
+This repository contains a prototype meta-compiler that compiles ISLE rules
+down to an instruction selector implementation in generated Rust code. The
+generated code operates efficiently in a single pass over the input, and merges
+all rules into a decision tree, sharing work where possible, while respecting
+user-configurable priorities on each rule.
+
+The ISLE language is designed so that the rules can both be compiled into an
+efficient compiler backend and can be used in formal reasoning about the
+compiler. The compiler in this repository implements the former. The latter
+use-case is future work and outside the scope of this prototype, but at a high
+level, the rules can be seen as simple equivalences between values in two
+languages, and so should be translatable to formal constraints or other logical
+specification languages.
+
+Some more details are in [BA RFC
+#15](https://github.com/bytecodealliance/rfcs/pull/15); additional
+documentation will eventually be added to carefully specify the language
+semantics.
+
+## Sketch of Instruction Selector
+
+Please see [this Cranelift
+branch](https://github.com/cfallin/wasmtime/tree/isle) for an ongoing sketch of
+an instruction selector backend in Cranelift that uses ISLE.
+
+## Example Usage
+
 ```plain
     $ cargo build --release
     $ target/release/isle -i isle_examples/test.isle -o isle_examples/test.rs