Silk, a simple systems programming language
Hi HN! Silk is a project I began working on approximately six months ago without any prior experience or knowledge of compiler design, and it's been a frustrating but fun learning experience. It is very much a work in progress, but I would love to hear feedback of any kind!
Silk, a simple systems programming language launched on April 20, 2020 with 79 votes, #721 of 5,003 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 6 years on.
In plain words
Silk is a systems programming language created by a developer learning compiler design from scratch. The project aims to simplify systems programming through a straightforward syntax and design. Still in active development, Silk represents an ongoing learning experiment in language creation, with the maker actively seeking community feedback to improve the project.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Silk is a small system programming language that I wrote for fun and clout. It is designed to be as flexible and simple as C, but more pleasant to write. To that end, Silk provides Silk does not aim to be as safe or fast as C++, Rust, etc. The LLVM backend (you didn’t think I wrote an end-to-end compiler, did you?) does all of the optimization. As is true of many of my projects, Silk is currently alpha -stage software. Silk is heavily inspired by Go and other modern programming languages. Though safety is not a primary design goal, Silk’s features make writing unsafe code more difficult than it would otherwise be. The val and var keywords declare immutable values and mutable variables…from ajaymt.github.io
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