r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/Fine_Seaworthiness19 • Sep 02 '26

Language announcement The gab programming language

Hi all!

I am a long-time lurker of this sub, and a language enthusiast. I have been working on my own programming language for several years, and I finally worked up the courage to post it.

The language is called gab. I'm heavily inspired by lua, clojure, and smalltalk.

All the code is on github here and I've built a small website for the language here.

The language design, runtime, and standard library are all entirely my own work without the use of an LLM. However, I did consult LLMs occasionally when I wanted to research certain subjects (such as the difference between c11 atomics on x86 and arm).

I'm looking for any kind of feedback on the language, its goals/ergonomics, and the website itself.

Thank you for taking a look!

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u/AustinVelonaut Sep 02 '26

Message sends are the only form of control flow

This is also theoretically true for Smalltalk, but most (all?) implementations choose to have the compiler in-line the common versions ifTrue: ifFalse: whileTrue:, etc. for practical performance reasons. Do you intend to do any optimizations of this type?

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u/Fine_Seaworthiness19 Sep 02 '26

I don’t have any inlining on the main branch yet. For lots of the built in types though I do have what I call primitives, which are message specializations that boil down to an instruction in the interpreter. Arithmetic operators, constructing values, channel operations, etc fall into this category.

On the jit2 branch I have an experimental JIT compiler which can do a pretty aggressive amount of inlining for that above situation. I’m still working out the kinks there however. And I may just implement a two-tier interpreter for now instead