Thoughts for my own Systems Language

2026-04-11 - Note:

I have taken these notes and ideas from stuff I wrote in 2020/21. It is here for archival purposes and because the idea is not abandoned (I've been quite busy at these last couple years) but the concepts from the language need heavy revision from my end after many years of deliberation in my head.

Preamble

I've been learning and writing C++ for a bit over a year and there have been so many amazing things I've learnt about the language in recent weeks. The level of control you can have over a program while being able to still abstract stuff in clever OOP systems is truly unique experience, especially compared to programming in Python.

And I finally get templates! It is one of the coolest things I seen in a programming language. I thought they were utterly useless before cause they never really worked when I tried to use them myself.

There are some things about the language I don't like. There is no package manager which makes it really hard to use external code. I spent multiple days a while back trying to understand how to get a package called pdcurses working for a project and didn't understand I need to be build it myself and then include it because, well I didn't know about make or whatever I used on my Windows device, I think it was Visual Studio 2019.

Other then that, pointers are tricky to get right and I keep forgetting delete when I use new. All this to say, I kinda wanna make my own language.

Kraken

Don't know why I like this name. Probably mostly because it is not used, it is easy to remember and I like the look of the extension *.kr.

The main idea is to have a language a lot like C++ but focused on good and simple defaults and offers many building blocks over complete features.

Necessary Features

• Structures
• Templates
• Custom operators
• Strongly typed
• Static types
• Closures/lambdas
• Threading support
• Atomic data types
• Basic data structures
• Modules/packages
• Basic algorithms lib

Update :: 2022-03-12

I've started learning Rust and I love the idea of its Enums. I know C++ got std::optional<T> which is great but its very hard to build your own Enums like Rust. I don't like using std::varient<Ts...> very much.

• Tagged Unions
• Option
• Result

Update :: 2024-10-04

• Monoidal IO (like Haskell)
• Functional programming

Update :: 2025-10-11

• Fine-grained access control for data like a filesystem¹²

Update :: 2026-04-11