Story

Show HN: Axe - A Systems Programming Language with Builtin Parallelism and No GC

death_eternal Monday, November 24, 2025

I'm writing a compiler for a systems language focused on concurrency and parallelism. It’s a re-engineering of a prior work, with an explicit emphasis on memory management and type safety, plus first-class parallel primitives at the language level.

The language is now capable of compiling a substantial portion of its own source code to tokens using a single-pass C back-end. The self-hosted compiler includes a handwritten lexer and a parser, with an arena-based allocator to support fast compilation and eliminate GC complexity.

The primary goals for the project are: First-class parallel and concurrent constructs built directly into the language, strong static memory and type guarantees, and a toolchain suitable for building high-performance software

Example:

  def main() {
      parallel local(mut arena: Arena) {
          arena = Arena.create(1024);

          val tid = Parallel.thread_id();
          val result = worker(ref_of(arena), tid);

          println $"Thread {tid} computed {result}";
          Arena.destroy(ref_of(arena));
      }
  }
You can find the repository here: https://github.com/axelang/axe

Summary
Axel is an open-source, general-purpose programming language that aims to combine the simplicity of Python with the performance and low-level control of Rust. It is designed for a wide range of applications, from system programming to data analysis and web development.
7 0
Summary
axelang.org
Visit article Read on Hacker News