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The Ü Programming Language
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo agoJust a suggestion... you might want to include an example on your main README. As someone building a language myself, I'm interested in the other languages actively in development... But you start with an info dump, no examples, and then a table of features - where the first feature is not something anyone would pick a language for. You claim to be a memory safe language... And those are buried in the middle of the list. You want to highlight that, and say how you accomplish it. You say you have no GC, but no mention of Affine Ownership or Ref Counting. You talk about thread safety, but no mention of how. You need to show WHY anyone should care about your language, what problem it's solving, and what that looks like as fast as possible. In your comparison table, you leave out Go and include Odin - that seems like a mistake. Go punches FAR above its weight class. Dismissing it because it "comes with a heavy runtime" is likely to get your project dismissed, no offense. Odin is - essentially - experimental. People's attention is fleeting. Everyone and their mother is building a language or two... Some things I want to know right away: 1) what stage are you at (honestly, not wishfully)? 2) what problems have you ACTUALLY solved instead of INTEND to solve at some point in the future? 3) how thorough is your testing, what do you have, how much, what's the coverage by category? 4) this seems like a performance language - I want benchmarks. If you don't have a good concurrency story, you better have something, and you better have convincing benchmarks that it actually works, otherwise - why is anyone from Go or Rust or Zig or Nim or Crystal or Swift or even Java/Kotlin/Scala or C# going to think about switching?
- throw385739 4mo agoFor those interested, I found code examples here: https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/tree/master/source/examples https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/tree/master/s...
- deterministic 4mo agoAll good points. I have sent a link to this page to the author of the language (Panzerschrek).
- rirze 4mo agoI hope the author is ok with this kind of publicity. He might not have wanted attention if the language is not ready for public opinion.
- deterministic 4mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45769161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45769161
- Panzerschrek 4mo agoThanks for the suggestions! > what stage are you at More than 10 years of development, the core aspects of the language are pretty stable and are unlikely to be changed in future. New features can be added, especially in the standard library. > what problems have you ACTUALLY solved instead of INTEND to solve at some point in the future? The main problem is memory safety. It's already solved and not planned to be solved. You already can't shoot your leg with typical memory-related errors. > how thorough is your testing, what do you have, how much, what's the coverage by category? I have a lot of tests, several thousands of test-cases covering each language feature, including tests for specific compilation errors, tests for compilation into actual binary code, many tests for each standard library feature, tests for the build system. And of course I have a self-hosted compiler, which proves that everything works as intended in actual code. > this seems like a performance language - I want benchmarks Nice suggestion, probably it's worth to adding some benchmarks. > it actually works It does. There is just nothing there in the language, which can degrade performance significantly. The same LLVM library is used as in C++ or Rust compilers, no GC is involved, runtime safety checks are sparse. In many cases the result binary code is identical for identical C++ or Rust code or at least closely matches it. My own rough measurements between two compiler generation (first one written in C++ and second one written in Ü) show nearly identical performance. > why is anyone from Go or Rust or Zig or Nim or Crystal or Swift or even Java/Kotlin/Scala or C# going to think about switching? Go and Java-VM based languages are garbage-collected, which is problematic in some areas (like video-games). Rust is fine, but is sometimes too complicated. Zig is just a better C with no memory safety. Nim isn't known for me.
- Lucasoato 4mo ago> Ü is heavily inspired by C++, but doesn't have its downsides. Also it was influenced by Rust, but only slightly and thus is way easier to use in comparison to Rust. Any possible coincidence with design and features of other programming languages is unintentional. Blessed are the humble, for they shall be humbled.
- kahrl 4mo ago[flagged]
- dang 4mo agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. If it were just an isolated comment I'd post a warning instead, but it's the majority of your posts! That's not cool, and we warned you once before. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- dexwiz 4mo agoBold claims with no examples. Anyone can make a markdown chart with some pros and cons. Description by comparison is weak.
- AdieuToLogic 4mo ago11775 commits in about a year is... concerning.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ricardobeat 4mo agoSomething is wrong with that commit count. There are a total of ~4k commits over nine years [1]. It looks like the author revived the project recently with the help of AI, but the majority of commits are from 2017-2024. Github might be counting all the branch activity from agents. [1] https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/graphs/contributors?from=6%2F1%2F2024 https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/graphs/contri...
- AdieuToLogic 4mo agoFrom the description of the graph you kindly provided: Contributions per week to master, line counts have been omitted because commit count exceeds 10,000. So I am confused as to the "total of ~4k commits over nine years" determination, unless this is in reference to commits Panzerschrek has made spanning the last two years (not nine).
- ricardobeat 4mo agoI could swear it showed 4k commits for the "All" timeline. Probably a UI fluke. Wrong on both counts anyway, see author's comment! Either way, over 8-9 years that's not an abnormal pace.
- Panzerschrek 4mo agoNo LLMs and "agents" were involved. All code is written by hand. In past several years I have had a lot of time for developing Ü, since I have quit my day-job.
- ricardobeat 4mo ago
- bob001 4mo agoThe README makes me never want to use this. A career of seeing the same style from shit vendor salespeople has made me assume that under the hood is nothing but snakes.
- Panzerschrek 4mo agoCould you explain please, what is exactly wrong with the README and maybe suggest, how to fix it?
- qalmakka 4mo agoWhenever you are publishing something, whether it be an app, a programming language, ... the examples or screenshots must come first. The reality is that unless you have made a very compelling case beforehand (like with a well crafted screenshot or example), most people will not read your list or description below. Put the examples at the start of the README, they're the selling point of your language not the list of features For instance, this was the first ever version of the rust-lang.org website: https://web.archive.org/web/20111226082307/https://rust-lang.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20111226082307/https://rust-lang... I remember reading it 14 years ago and it was pretty effective at captivating users towards the language. Notice its terseness and the example at the bottom: a reader will first look at the example, then the bullet points above if they're interested, and then the rest of the docs
- librasteve 4mo agoi like the rust page example… use std; import std::io; fn main() { for i in [1, 2, 3] { io::println(#fmt("hello %d\n", i)); } } here’s what the Raku site should look like: say “hello $_” for ^3
- bob001 4mo agoThere two main things: - Overly boastful language. Nothing is perfect, everything has limitations, etc, etc. If the creator isn't willing to admit that and be open about it then that just means users will hit those issue instead. - Saying what others are not versus saying what you are. You're talking more about other languages than your own language. Vendors do that as a cheap marketing trick to use the popularity of others to boost themselves.
- jimbob45 4mo agoAre there plans to bring in compile-time attributes like C#? I really like what I’m seeing here apart from the lack of that. Edit: also the name is ungoogleable.
- kensai 4mo agoNot if you have a German keyboard.
- Panzerschrek 4mo agoI have thoughts about some kind of attributes for class fields and maybe classes. But such change isn't the first in the list of features to be done, there are more important things to do.
- theamk 4mo ago> Ü uses RAII for memory and resources management (no GC is involved), but manual memory management may be still used in unsafe code. Saying "using RAII for memory management" is insufficient - with just RAII, you cannot even assign a class into a passed-in variable. The language designer _must_ make make more choices to get a useful language - maybe affine types, or linear types, or prohibit many C++-like idioms, or maybe just good-old refcounted shared pointers (but I'd argue this is a form of GC...) > Ü is memory-safe and race-condition-safe, as long as no unsafe code is involved at all or as long as unsafe code is correctly written. How is this achieved? The docs mention in passing that there is some sort of thread-safe immutable structs, but it is not really clear what's the overall picture and how they interact with non-trivial code. And the examples have nothing on thread.
- zabzonk 4mo ago> Saying "using RAII for memory management" is insufficient - with just RAII, you cannot even assign a class into a passed-in variable. What exactly do you mean by " assign a class into a passed-in variable"? Please post some code illustrating what you are talking about.
- theamk 4mo agofunction make_widget(parent& x): w = new Widget() x.children.add(w) RAII is not going to help you here, you need something else (move semantics or refcount-based GC are most common, but other choices exist too). If this one is too easy, make function return "w" as well, or make it add a widget to two different lists
- zabzonk 4mo agoWell, if this is supposed to be something like C++, and if "new" is dynamically allocating memory, then simply don't do that - this kind of thing has been solved years ago.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- nvr219 4mo agoThis is clearly satire.
- oofbey 4mo agoYou underestimate the egos involved.
- zitterbewegung 4mo agoHow do I Google for this language……
- dietr1ch 4mo agoIt's sad that the compose key isn't prevalent. Combining " and u into ü makes a lot of sense, however people thought that we wanted 40 different slightly different keyboard layouts instead of a universal one. Despite how annoying it might seem to get, it's not that bad really.
- jdnier 4mo ago"Ü programming language" brings up the Github docs with Google, as does "U programming language", although this HN post comes up second. On a Mac "Ü" is typed "option-u shift-u".
- Panzerschrek 4mo agoI use Ctrl+Shift+U followed by DC to type it. Or sometimes just switch to german keyboard layout. One can also just copy-paste its name.
- Topology1 4mo agoI find the "Why choosing Ü?" table to be particularly amusing. Just cherry-picked language features where Ü happens to achieve all of them!
- Panzerschrek 4mo agoYou are partially right. I cherry-picked features which I personally find important. But since they are so important for me, I bothered designing/implementing them in the language in a right way.
- jdnier 4mo agoThere was a "Show HN: Ü Programming Language" from the author last October. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45769161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45769161
- jdnier 4mo agoSome more resources from that post: > See examples (https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/tree/master/source/examples https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/tree/master/s...) to get a general idea what Ü is and how it looks like and feels. Read the documentation (https://panzerschrek.github.io/U-00DC-Sprache-site/docs/en/contents.html https://panzerschrek.github.io/U-00DC-Sprache-site/docs/en/c...) for more details. If you have some questions about the specific mechanism providing safety, read the corresponding chapter (https://panzerschrek.github.io/U-00DC-Sprache-site/docs/en/reference_checking.html https://panzerschrek.github.io/U-00DC-Sprache-site/docs/en/r...). If some topic isn't clear for you after reading the documentation, contact me and I can answer your questions.
- librasteve 4mo agothis homepage has snippets to die for https://raku.org/ https://raku.org/
- porkyhalal 4mo ago[flagged]
- andai 4mo ago>ungoogleable name >code examples are linked as a footnote at the bottom of the page (and need to open each code file individually to view them) This project apparently does not want to succeed. (Which is odd given the amount of effort invested in it!) The language itself seems quite nice though.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- fleur-de-lotus 4mo agoWho are U to judge the name ?
- bulbar 4mo agoWhy does DeepL translate "Panzerschreck" to "Panzerschreck"? Is that actually a word understood by English native speakers? I know the words "Panzer" and "Schreck" (normal word of used in the appropriate context), but didn't exactly know what a Panzerschreck is. Well, a fitting translation seems to be "Bazooka". However, "Panzerschreck" sounds like an old fashioned German word (not too surprising I guess) that wouldn't be used anymore today. The typo which I think might be intentional makes it kind of silly.
- Panzerschrek 4mo agoI choose my nickname many years ago, when I was much younger and had troubles with correct spelling. Now it's too late to change it.
- self_awareness 4mo ago> duck-typing in templates (without mandatory template type requirements specification) "Some may call this junk. Me, I call them treasures."
- rootlocus 4mo agoUsing a font so close to Fraktur for a german letter is definitely an intentional choice if you want to evoke nazi imagery.
- Panzerschrek 4mo agoThe author here. Many here probably want to know if the language actually works as intended and solves problems mentioned in it's README. I can absolutely say yes, it works! Since November 2025 I develop a project written (almost) fully in Ü. It's a video game. It's not finished yet, but I plan to release a mostly-working version in several months, including making its source code open. So, stay tuned. I already have ~45000 lines of code in this project. All this is manually-written (no LLMs involved). Writing Ü is nice, and code mostly works if it compiles. No single time I needed finding/fixing memory-related issues (typical for languages like C++). No single time I faced a crash in random place, if something crashed, it was a safety check. The standard library covers basic needs. unsafe code is used only to interact with SDL2 and OpenGL functions. I spend my time mostly developing this game project. But occasionally I fix bugs and make small improvements in the language itself. This explains why there are so little commits in last months compared to time before November 2025.
- ungut 4mo agoWhy the nazi-esque "Frakturschrift" Logo? I get the font was not originally associated like that, but your name and that logo make me question what's behind it. I'm Austrian.
- Panzerschrek 4mo agoSuch fonts were in use many centuries before NS time in many countries in north Europe. There were eventually replaced by modern ones, but in Germany they lasted long enough, until WWII. It's a common misconception, that only nazis used it. Even more, they forced replacement of fraktur fonts with modern ones. Nowadays such fonts are in use in places where an old-looking font is needed, like in signs. Also modern nazis use it sometimes, but only because they don't know history well. I selected fraktur for a logo of my language because it looks "cool" and is already pretty stylized compared to a boring logo using some modern font. I don't insist to use it forever, maybe I will change it later with some better one, but for this someone else need to draw it properly, I don't have necessary design skills for this. My nick-name is easy to explain. Many years ago I have enjoyed playing Wolfenstein and Call of Duty and these games have Panzerschreck as one of weapons. I choose this as my nick-name, but I unfortunately misspelled it.
- frizlab 4mo agoMmmh I don’t know about most of the languages with which this language compares itself in the readme, but for Swift it seems that the comparison is either out-of-date or misinformed. - thread-safety (no race conditions): Swift has full concurrency checks since Swift 6, which prevents race-conditions*. - compile-time calculations: Macros can permit compile-time compilations. The syntax is not lightweight, that’s for sure, but it is possible. And you can do much more than “just” compile-time compilation. - references (with auto reference creation and dereferencing): I am not fully sure what this is about, but classes are references… *Logical race-conditions are still, obviously, possible, but unsafe concurrent access to the same variables are not.
- umitkaanusta 4mo agoas an ü person i endorse it
- lanycrost 4mo agoGuess your comparison with C++ in this case needs to be revised, or at least you need to look into this in other point. As well as the part about the similarity with other languages is co incidents make me laugh :D Hope you'll make this really great, but you need better comparisons and better wording and docs. > Exceptions are also one of the greatest C++ sins. They were problematic from the start, several attempts to fix them (like noexcept annotations) were done, but C++ exceptions still remain fundamentally wrong. They violate one of the most significant C++ design principles - don’t pay for what you don’t use. Even so-called zero-cost exception implementations (on happy path) aren’t really zero-cost, since they affect optimizations, because of possible unwinding. Also they introduce additional executable bloat - for unwinding code.
- 1attice 4mo agoHi Panzershreck, I can't help but notice your username, and the fraktur font, and of course the umlaut. Are you aware that the flavouring you've chosen for your user account, the product name, and its logotype are referencing 1930s Germany? I wonder what the intent could be. NB non German speakers, "shreck" is fear, and "panzer" is well-known to anyone who has watched nearly any documentary about WWII. The Fraktur typeface is an older Prussian typeface vigorously revived by the National Socialists, who, IIRC, made it mandatory for government documents, because Helvetica was considered woke.
- kbelder 4mo agoYou should save face by editing in a '/sarcasm' as soon as possible.
- 1attice 4mo agoI was not, and I am not, because it obviously is. - 'Panzer', of course, is a famous Nazi tank model - 'Schrek' is from _schrecklish_, terrifying (sp?) in German - The typeface, Fraktur, has a specific meaning in the National Socialist design language, which is, by about a century, the last time it was regularly used (IIRC.) So, you tell me. In an Internet awash with encoded symbols, what are these ones telling you? Use your eyes, your noggin, and your German history texts.
- danhau 4mo agoTo nitpick: > 'Panzer', of course, is a famous Nazi tank model Panzer is German for tank, or armor. It‘s not referring to any model specifically, I don’t think, but I‘m not a historian. Panzerschreck (spelled correctly) is something like „tank scare“. But indeed, that GitHub page gives off the wrong vibes. Using this project will be tough, at least in Germany and Austria, lest you want to be suspected of Wiederbetätigung.
- 1attice 4mo agoThank you. It's been several decades since I studied.
- _s_a_m_ 4mo agoDo we really need this? I'd rather improve the type checker of some heavily used existing language
- renox 4mo ago1) the name is a discoverability issue for non-german people. 2) In the examples, the placement of & is incoherent: sometimes it's 'i64&', sometimes it is 'i64 &', pick one (I prefer the first). 3) constexpr is a long name for a 'base' concept. comp/<a special letter> would be better. Also conversion_constructor is huge. 4) In D, their static_if doesn't introduce a scope, Alexei Alexandrescu has made a very insteresting pitch about this. 5) zero_init is nice. 6) I don't like "hidden" overloaded operators, how about #+ for the overloaded variant of +? 7) you support i128 natively but integer literals are limited to 2*64-1? 8) I'm slowly reading "reference checking" ( https://panzerschrek.github.io/U-00DC-Sprache-site/docs/en/reference_checking.html https://panzerschrek.github.io/U-00DC-Sprache-site/docs/en/r... ) which seems to be an important part of the language, and I still don't know what's the integer overflow behaviour which is quite important.. I advocate Zig's behaviour: signed and unsigned have undefined behaviour in case of overflow for optimised build, trap in debug build and there are modulo operators.