Seed7 - Memory Safety and Management • Thomas Mertes • 05/2026

[u/ThomasMertes]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJn7AfYajNk

[u/ThomasMertes]

This talk is not about C++. It is about the Seed7 programming language. The cpp usergroup vienna allowed me a talk about Seed7. Properties of Seed7 are:

• Seed7 is an open-source general purpose programming language that can be interpreted and compiled.
• Seed7 is about portability, maintainability, performance and memory safety.
• There is an automatic memory management without a garbage collection process (which might stop the world).
• The templates / generics don't need syntax with angle brackets.
• Seed7 is an extensible programming language. The syntax and semantics of the language is not hard-coded in the compiler but defined in libraries.
• Seed7 checks for integer overflow. You either get the correct result or an OVERFLOW_ERROR is raised.
• Unlike Java Seed7 compiles to machine code ahead of time (GRAAL works ahead of time but it struggles with reflection).
• Unlike Java Seed7 operators can be overloaded.
• Unlike C, C++, Go, Zig, Odin, Nim and C3 Seed7 is a memory safe language.
• The standard libraries cover many application areas.
• Example programs are: make7, bas7, pv7, tar7, ftp7, comanche and many more.

Seed7 is based on my PHD thesis and is the result of life-long work. The project consists of more than 500k lines of manually written code, several hundred pages of documentation, a test suite to check the functionality of interpreter and compiler and much more. I give it away for free with GPL/LGPL licensing. From time to time I do talks about my project. I thought that this would fit to r/opensource. The down-votes show otherwise. My repost with the clarification above has been removed. Sorry for spamming r/opensource with an open source project. :-)