Programming Languages

roc5.7k★

Roc is a fast, friendly, functional programming language. The pitch is that you get syntax that stays out of your way (the Elm influence is obvious) without giving up the near-native speed that usually pushes people away from functional languages. Its standout idea is a split most languages don't make: you write pure logic in Roc, and a swappable "platform" underneath supplies everything that touches the outside world, files, network, screen. That lets a web-server platform and a CLI platform each tune performance for their domain, for free, from the app author's point of view. It's open source under a permissive license. Here's the honest part, and it matters more than any feature. Roc is not ready. The team says so directly: there's no 0.1 release yet, and the current compiler, mid-rewrite into Zig, is in their own words suited for things like programming puzzles. This is pre-alpha. The credibility is real: Richard Feldman, the face of Elm, leads it, and it's backed by a nonprofit foundation with sustained, multi-year engineering behind it. But credibility is not readiness. If you write functional code and like where this is going, experiment with it, follow it, maybe contribute. The closest comparisons are Elm (same creator, same friendliness, but Roc isn't locked to the browser), Gleam, Haskell, and OCaml. Anyone choosing between them today should know Roc is the youngest and least settled of the group. The catch is simple: don't build anything you care about on Roc yet. You'd be signing up for breaking changes, a tiny platform ecosystem, and a compiler the team itself calls puzzle-grade. It's a language to watch, not to ship.

zerolang5.1k★

zerolang is an experimental programming language built for AI agents, not people. The idea: give an agent a language whose compiler speaks back in clean, structured JSON, so the agent can check syntax, trace dependencies, and get repair suggestions without parsing human-readable error spew. It comes from Vercel Labs, Apache-licensed and free. Everything about it is tuned for machines: token-efficient syntax, fast startup, low memory, zero dependencies. The compiler exposes stable inspection commands with predictable output contracts, which is exactly what an autonomous coding loop needs to work reliably instead of guessing. The catch is right there in the README: this is pre-1.0, security holes are expected, and it's explicitly not for production, sensitive data, or trusted infrastructure. It's a research bet on what agent-native tooling could look like, not something to build a product on yet. Worth watching if you work on autonomous code generation. Skip it if you need anything stable.

zero5.1k★

Zero is an experimental programming language from Vercel Labs aimed at code that AI agents need to write, check, and ship. It is a new systems language (think Rust or Go) where the compiler emits structured, machine-readable output so an agent can actually act on errors instead of pattern-matching error strings. Apache-2.0 licensed, fully free. The README is explicit that the language is not stable yet. Install drops a binary into ~/.zero/bin. No Docker, no runtime, no Postgres. zero check, zero run, zero build. Cross-compiles to common targets. Source files end in .0. Watch this if you are paying attention to where agent tooling is going. Do not build production systems on it. Rust and Go are stable, mature, and have actual ecosystems. Zero is a bet on a thesis: that languages built explicitly for AI authorship will outcompete general-purpose ones when agents do most of the writing. The catch: experimental means experimental. Vercel Labs ships interesting research, but not all of it survives. If you commit to this language now and it gets shelved in eighteen months, you own that decision.

cuda-oxide2.8k★

cuda-oxide lets you write GPU code in plain Rust and compiles it straight to CUDA. Normally, programming an NVIDIA GPU means CUDA C or C++ or a special DSL, this NVIDIA Labs project compiles standard Rust down to PTX, the low-level bytecode the GPU actually runs. You get generics, closures, GPU intrinsics, even async, in a language with real memory safety. There's nothing to host, it's a compiler toolchain you install and build against. The ops burden is the real story: this is low-level GPU work, so you need an NVIDIA GPU, the CUDA toolkit, and the patience to deal with an early compiler. It is not a smooth on-ramp, it's a power tool for people who already know what PTX is. Rust developers doing GPU compute who don't want to drop into C++ are the audience. If you're happy in CUDA C or using higher-level ML frameworks that hide the GPU entirely, you don't need this. The appeal is writing kernels in one safe language instead of context-switching into C++ every time you touch the hardware. The catch: it's explicitly early-alpha. NVIDIA's own README warns of bugs, missing features, and breaking API changes. It's free and Apache-licensed and the idea is excellent, but this is a watch-and-experiment project, not something to put under production kernels yet. Treat it as a preview of where Rust-on-GPU is heading.

daScript1.1k★

Daslang, formerly daScript, is a scripting language built for games that refuse to pay the usual scripting tax. The problem it targets: most embeddable languages like Lua sit behind a marshaling layer, so every call between your C++ engine and your scripts copies and converts data. Daslang is statically typed and lays out its data to match C++, which means that interop cost largely disappears. For a game pushing thousands of script calls per frame, that is the difference between scripting being viable and being a bottleneck. This is not a tool you install, it is a language you adopt. You embed the compiler into a C++ codebase, bind your native types, and wire it into your build, which is a real engineering investment. The payoff is flexibility in how you run it: an interpreter for fast iteration, ahead-of-time compilation to C++ for shipping, or an LLVM JIT, plus hot reload during development. It is backed by Gaijin Entertainment, the studio behind War Thunder, so it is proven in a shipping title rather than a side experiment. It is BSD-3 licensed and entirely free, with no commercial tier. The real comparison is to other embeddable languages, not to any paid product. Lua and LuaJIT are the defaults most teams reach for, with AngelScript, Wren, and Squirrel as alternatives. Daslang earns its place specifically when that interop overhead is hurting you and you want static typing on top. The catch is that this solves a problem most projects do not have. When Lua is fast enough, the static typing and tighter C++ integration are not worth the steeper learning curve and smaller community. Reach for it once you have measured the cost and Lua is the thing in your way.