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Nucleus

by @Zak

Nucleus programming language: https://github.com/zakwilson/nucleus/ It's still pretty early, possibly buggy, and almost certain to get breaking changes without warning. My original thought was to combine Lisp syntax and structural macros with C semantics and see how much extra abstraction that would provide, but variants of that idea have been tried before. They may have been compelling at a certain point in time, but I think a new systems programming language in 2026 should offer more, so it does. Some features include: strong typing, protocols (similar to Clojure or Rust traits), non-nullable references, error values, bound error handlers (a bit like Common Lisp), optional lexical lifetimes, namespaces, and no mandatory runtime overhead relative to C. It's self-hosted, which I've noticed several new systems programming languages announced recently are not.

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