Show HN: Axe - A Systems Programming Language with Builtin Parallelism and No GC

[death_eternal]

I'm writing a compiler for a systems language focused on concurrency and parallelism. It’s a re-engineering of a prior work, with an explicit emphasis on memory management and type safety, plus first-class parallel primitives at the language level.

The language is now capable of compiling a substantial portion of its own source code to tokens using a single-pass C back-end. The self-hosted compiler includes a handwritten lexer and a parser, with an arena-based allocator to support fast compilation and eliminate GC complexity.

The primary goals for the project are: First-class parallel and concurrent constructs built directly into the language, strong static memory and type guarantees, and a toolchain suitable for building high-performance software

Example:

  def main() {
      parallel local(mut arena: Arena) {
          arena = Arena.create(1024);

          val tid = Parallel.thread_id();
          val result = worker(ref_of(arena), tid);

          println $"Thread {tid} computed {result}";
          Arena.destroy(ref_of(arena));
      }
  }

You can find the repository here: https://github.com/axelang/axe

[Panzerschrek]

How does it achieve memory safety?

Does it have destructors and RAII?

Does it have type and function templates?

[death_eternal]

1. It manages memory through deterministic ownership rules and optional arena allocation. Pointers never outlive the allocator that created them, and the compiler performs lifetime checks to prevent use-after-free or double-free errors.

2. Axe does not use C++-style RAII. It employs deterministic cleanup through defer, which allows resources to be released predictably. Also, objects allocated inside an arena are freed as a group when the corresponding arena is destroyed.

3. Not yet. There is an overload system currently:

  overload println(x: generic) {
      string => print_str;
      char*  => println_chrptr;
      i32    => println_i32;
      char   => println_char;
  }(x);

[surajssc1232]

How fast is it

[death_eternal]

Very.