Vale's Vision

Vale aims to bring a new way of programming into the world that offers speed, safety, and ease of use.

The world needs something like this! Currently, most programming language work is in:

• High-overhead languages involving reference counting and tracing garbage collection.
• Complex languages (Ada/Spark, Coq, Rust, Haskell, etc.) which impose higher complexity burden and mental overhead on the programmer.

These are useful, but there is a vast field of possibilities in between, waiting to be explored!

Our aim is to explore that space, discover what it has to offer, and make speed and safety easier than ever before.

In this quest, we've discovered and implemented a lot of new techniques:

• Generational Memory, for a language to ensure an object still exists at the time of dereferencing.
• Higher RAII, a form of linear typing that enables destructors with parameters and returns.
• Fearless FFI, which allows us to call into C without risk of accidentally corrupting Vale objects.
• Perfect Replayability, to record all inputs and replay execution, and completely solve heisenbugs and race bugs.

These techniques have also opened up some new emergent possibilities, which we hope to implement, which we hope to implement:

• Region Borrow Checking, which adds mutable aliasing support to a Rust-like borrow checker.
• Hybrid-Generational Memory, which ensures that nobody destroys an object too early, for better optimizations.
• Seamless concurrency, the ability to launch multiple threads that can access any pre-existing data without data races, without the need for refactoring the code or the data.
• Object pools and bump-allocators that are memory-safe and decoupled, so no refactoring needed.

We also gain a lot of inspiration from other languages, and are finding new ways to combine their techniques:

• We can mix an unsafe block with Fearless FFI to make a much safer systems programming language!
• We can mix Erlang's isolation benefits with functional reactive programming to make much more resilient programs!
• We can mix region borrow checking with Pony's iso to support shared mutability.

...plus a lot more interesting ideas to explore!

The Vale programming language is a novel combination of ideas from the research world and original innovations. Our goal is to publish our techniques, even the ones that couldn't fit in Vale, so that the world as a whole can benefit from our work here, not just those who use Vale.

Our medium-term goals:

• Finish the Region Borrow Checker, to show the world that shared mutability can work with borrow checking!
• Prototype Hybrid-Generational Memory in Vale, to see how fast and easy we can make single ownership.
• Publish the Language Simplicity Manifesto, a collection of principles to keep programming languages' learning curves down.
• Publish the Memory Safety Grimoire, a collection of "memory safety building blocks" that languages can potentially use to make new memory models, just like Vale combined generational references and scope tethering.

We aim to publish articles biweekly on all of these topics, and create and inspire the next generation of fast, safe, and easy programming languages.