Inspired by Swift, Hylo is a new programming language, as of this writing, that aims to combine speed, safety, and simplicity.
Originally known as Val, the language leverages mutable value semantics and generic programming for high-level systems programming.
Led by Jean-Philippe Bernardy, a professor of computer science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Hylo's develop hope to create a language that is fast by definition, safe by default, and simple.
Hylo is compiled ahead of time to machine code, and relies on its type system to support in-place mutation and avoid unnecessary memory allocations. As the language is designed to avoid hidden costs such as implicit copies, it does not depend heavily on an optimizer for its basic performance.
The language's foundation of mutable value semantics ensures that ordinary code is memory-safe, typesafe, and data-race-free. Through explicit, auditable opt-in, Hylo programmers can use unsafe constructs for performance where necessary, and they can build safe constructs using unsafe ones.
Similar to Swift, Hylo demonstrates a user-friendly approach to generic programming and deep support for value semantics. Its programming model strengthens and extends this support beyond Swift while de-emphasizing reference semantics and avoiding the complexities involved in making it statically safe.
As of this writing, Hylo is under active development and is not ready to be used yet. The code on the compiler is open-source and hosted on GitHub, which includes a forum for community discussions.
Recommended Resources
GitHub: Hylo Language Discussions
Hosted on GitHub, the official repository for Hylo files and documentation, a forum is provided for developers, maintainers, and other members of the Hylo community to discuss various issues pertinent to the language's ongoing development, including announcements, concerns, or questions. While anyone may read the discussions, only registered members can participate in discussions. A code of conduct offers guidelines for appropriate participation in this Hylo community forum.
https://github.com/orgs/hylo-lang/discussions
Under development by a team of developers who are working on the programming language. Hosted on GitHub, the group has fifteen repositories related to Hylo, including the source code of the compiler, the specification of the language, the landing page of the website, and various tools and plugins. The group also has a discussion forum where ideas, feedback, and updates about the programming language can be shared. Hylo is an open-source project licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
https://github.com/hylo-lang
The official website for the Hylo programming language, originally known as Val, outlines the goals and current status of the project, an overview of Hylo's features, language specification, and IR specification, offering detailed information about Hylo's syntax and semantics. The goals of the Hylo developers overlap with those of Rust and other efforts, such as Zig or Vale, but Hylo is set apart by its focus on mutable value semantics for writing efficient, generic code.
https://www.hylo-lang.org/
This tour provides an overview of the Hylo programming language's features in the form of a progressive guide, assuming familiarity with an imperative programming language, such as JavaScript, Python, or C++. Although this tour does not cover the entire language, a link to its specifications on GitHub is provided for more detailed information. Included is a "Hello World" example, and information on its modules, bindings, basic types, functions and methods, subscripts, and concurrency.
https://docs.hylo-lang.org/
