Alternatives
Products that do what A systems language with runtime reflection and no GC does
Hi HN, I’ve been working on an experimental programming language called XXML. The project started from a frustration I kept running into across systems languages: Languages with strong ownership tend to avoid runtime reflection. Languages with rich reflection usually rely on GC or give up memory guarantees. Compile-time code generation often requires a separate macro language. I wanted to explore whether those tradeoffs are truly necessary. What XXML is trying to do XXML is a statically-typed, native language that: Uses explicit ownership and borrowing (no garbage collector) Supports runtime…
- 1MM
I've been working on implementing the compile-time approach to memory management described in this thesis (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-908.pdf) for some time now - some of the performance results look promising! (Although some less so...) I think it would be great to see this taken further and built into a more complete functional language.
2020 · github.com
- 2EA
eno [1] - A modern plaintext language w/ libraries [2] for JavaScript, Python, Ruby & soon more! We migrated a big relational research database to a file-based solution - requirements were: - Super fast and easy editability for users - Highest performance for parsing/validating >10K documents on every user change. Our trials with YAML/TOML showed us that we wanted something both faster [3][4] and easier [4], something tailored for file-based content management ... and after months of research & development it's now publicly available (under MIT license) for everyone! Last but…
2018
- 3VN
Greetings HN, I have been working on a new programming language for the last 3 years and thought it was time to share it with some people. The core of the language is done and i have been using it to create all software related to the language: the compiler itself, the website and vman (valk manager, like npm). There's still alot of work todo but was hoping for some feedback. Maybe an interesting feature of the language is (so i think) that it's the first language with a stateful garbage collector. It basically knows what memory goes out of scope and which doesn't without having to scan for…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 4L0
What's your tool chain for data and document processing? - jq is great, but limited to JSON; and jQuery limited to HTML; templating systems get messy for non-trivial logic; TypeScript lacks pattern matching and schema support. So I built Lambda — an expressive functional language that combines the power of Lisp, TypeScript, and many DSLs like jq, jQuery, RelaxNG, etc. It has a lightweight 9 MB runtime, built from scratch in C/C++, that provides an end-to-end document processing pipeline (parse → validate/query/transform → layout → render/view). Internally, Lambda parse…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 5BC
btrc is a statically-typed language that transpiles to C11. It adds classes, generics (monomorphized), type inference, lambdas, f-strings, collections (Vector, Map, Set), threads, GPU compute via WebGPU, ARC memory management, exception handling, and a standard library — while generating strict C11 with no runtime, no GC, and no VM. The compiler is a 6-stage Python pipeline (lexer → parser → analyzer → IR gen → optimizer → C emitter) driven by a formal EBNF grammar and an algebraic AST spec (Zephyr ASDL). The generated C is readable and linkable with any C11 compiler. It ships with a VS Code…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 6TI
Spent a week in the break building a pre-compiler that brings type safety to runtime. Still pretty early, but generally does what it says. Looking for feedback, code that breaks it (check out the playground), ideas etc.
Jan 2026 · typical.elliots.dev
- 7RA
2015 · github.com
- 8PR
Hi HN, While building RAG agents, I noticed a lot of token budget was wasted on formatting overhead (HTML tags, JSON structure, whitespace). Existing solutions felt too heavy (often requiring torch/transformers), so I wrote this lightweight, zero-dependency library to solve it. It includes strategies for context packing, PII redaction, and tool output compression. Benchmarks show it can save ~15% of tokens with negligible latency overhead (<0.5ms). Happy to answer any questions!
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 9GA
I started working on this back in 2019, mostly as a design idea. Over the last month I made a big push to make it 100% usable and replace C# in all my personal projects. I now feel it's solid enough to gather feedback from other developers. If you take it for a spin, I hope you enjoy it and send your thoughts!
Jun 2026 · davidobando.github.io
- 10FA
Hi everyone! I wrote a DSL (named Form Modeling Language) for modeling & building complex forms and am glad to share it with you now. Over the years, I’ve encountered many challenges while building complex forms from scratch—challenges that I believe are common, difficult, and yet often overlooked. These include managing interdependent fields, handling intricate validation rules, and maintain good collaboration between technical and non-technical people. FormML is my attempt to address these pain points. The project's README goes into more detail, but in short, FormML offers a model-first…
2024 · github.com
- 11AA
2017 · github.com
- 12MC
multilspy is a cross-platform library designed to simplify the process of creating language server clients to query and obtain results of various static analyses from a wide variety of language servers that communicate over the Language Server Protocol. It is easily extensible to support any language that has a Language Server and currently supports Java, Rust, C# and Python. We aim to continuously add support for more language servers and languages. Language servers are tools that perform a variety of static analyses on code repositories and provide useful information such as type-directed…
2024 · github.com
- 13IA
Hi there. I'm working on a programming language -- called Ink - in my spare time, with a friend. It uses LLVM for the backend, the parser and lexer are both hand written in C. The project is just for a bit of fun, we aren't trying to "revolutionize the programming language", but we're okay with being a bit quirky and out of the box with some of the syntax/features in the language. At the moment, the language is in it's early stages, and there's still a lot to do, which means that if you want to learn more about compilers, now would be a good time to start working on the language, since…
2015
- 14FT
After six months of work, I am here again presenting Fluent – a tiny lang which is optimized for differentiable & reactive programming. Since I am not Conal Elliot, don't expect a beautiful theoretical unification of FRP and AD from first principles. Rather, a horrific monster that holds together mostly because a lot of duct-tape. The link points to the semi-interactive tour of the language, which will get the job done much better than I could in here. Hope you hate/like it!
Jul 2026 · mlajtos.github.io
- 15BA
Hi all, I've been working on a new programming language called Blade for a couple of months now and think it's time I introduced it to people and get reactions and feedbacks. Plus, I need people to test it and find the bugs in it. The repository is at https://github.com/blade-lang/blade and the documentation is in progress and going great at bladelang.com and even though I wanted to wait to write everything before I do this before, I think it's best to get started with letting people know about it now. There are lots of tests in the repository and experienced developers…
2021
- 16BA
I started this in January and haven't written a line of the compiler myself. Coding agents write every line; I do design and taste. Wado is a Rust-flavored, GC'd language for WebAssembly Component Model. Try it in the browser, and ask me anything!
Jul 2026 · wado-lang.org
- 17TJ
After 6 years of coding almost every day, I'm finally ready to show HN. There's a lot going on here, looking forward to your guy's feedback.
Jul 2026 · jaclang.org
- 18GA
Hello HN! These last few months I've been working on my first open source project: an embedded database written in pure-go. That took me some months, as I had to learn how to deal with such large packages. Until then, all packages I had made were quite small an did not require much. I usually did not have to worry about things like allocation optimization and instance pools until This project. It started when I wanted to make a port of a tool to a TUI environment. I'm actually used to working with TUIs in golang, so that was my language of choice. The tool I wanted to port is written in…
Feb 2026
- 19TT
Hello, we're the Treenix team. We're building typed low-code runtime where humans and agents collaborate to build applications and workflows. Write a simple TypeScript class with methods, and Treenix automatically delivers admin interface, storage, API and MCP, access rules, UI form and audit trail. Views in Treenix are reactive, data-bound, and synced across all clients. They also support display contexts: data can render differently depending on the situation — a table in one place, a list in another. You can register multiple Views for the same data type, and the view engine picks the…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 20AC
2021 · gist.github.com
- 21RA
Hello HN! Just wanted to share a small project I've been working for the last few months. It's a tool called Runal, a text-based creative coding environment that runs in the terminal. It works similarly as processing or p5js but it does all the rendering as text. And it can either be scripted with JavaScript or used as a Go package. It's open-source and cross-platform (linux, macOS, windows). It seems to me that text/ascii-art aesthetics are really popular in creative coding communities, so I though it would make sense to create a tool that runs on a platform which can render text only.…
2025 · github.com
- 22SG
Hi HN, I built NOMA (Neural-Oriented Machine Architecture), a systems language where reverse-mode autodiff is a compiler pass (lowered to LLVM IR). My goal is to treat model parameters as explicit, growable memory buffers. Since NOMA compiles to standalone native binaries (no Python runtime), it allows using realloc on weights mid-training. This makes "self-growing" architectures a system primitive rather than a complex framework hack. I just pushed a reproducible benchmark (Self-Growing XOR) to validate the methodology: it compares NOMA against PyTorch and C++, specifically testing how…
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 23OS
Hi HN, we’re Dylan and Matthew, building sublingual (https://github.com/sublingual-ai/sublingual), an open-source LLM observability tool you can use with zero code changes. As developers focused on iterating and building features as fast as possible, we felt observability would’ve been a helpful tool to have, but we found existing solutions had too much overhead to set up. So we gave ourselves the challenge of building an observability tool that you can integrate without changing a single line of code in your project. How it works Run your python application as usual with…
2025 · github.com
- 24QN
2020 · quicklang.net
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