My ideal programming language

October 10, 2024

This is my ideal programming language that I want to build:

• Garbage collected Rust (mix procedural and functional)
• Pattern matching like Rust (enums, structs)
• Compiled using Zig backend (use incremental compilation feature) / QBE
• Async like Elixir, using tasks. Integrated async runtime, no coloring
• Error handling like Zig
• Testing like Zig
• Same function signatures as Zig

The language is ideal as a general purpose, highly concurrent applications that needs to run fast and be developed fast. It should be expressive meaning that little code is needed to express the ideas, simple macros without killing compile times. Development cycle should be fast, maximum 1 second cycle. Optimized for developer experience by being an expressive language with excellent edit cycle and great performance.

Basically I want to take the best features of Rust, Zig, and Elixir with the same goals as Go in mind to create an excellent language with optimal compile-run-edit cycle, fast performance and expressive features.

By leveraging the efforts put into the Zig compiler, and writing the language in Zig, I can create a really nice language that avoids some of the pitfalls of Zig and Rust (async war, too low level, long compilation times).

I really like Zig, Elixir and Rust, some features are just better in one or the other:

• Error handling in Zig is better than Rust
• Expressive type system in Rust is better than Zig
• Async features in Elixir is top-notch (BEAM)
• Type system in Rust is great, if only we get rid of lifetimes and possibly generics (comptime?)