Valk
new programming language with a stateful GC
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Greetings HN,I have been working on a new programming language for the last 3 years and thought it was time to share it with some people. The core of the language is done and i have been using it to create all software related to the language: the compiler itself, the website and vman (valk manager, like npm). There's still alot of work todo but was hoping for some feedback. Maybe an interesting feature of the language is (so i think) that it's the first language with a stateful garbage collector. It basically knows what memory goes out of scope and which doesn't without having to scan for it. So no more mark/sweep. This new GC algorithm is kind of complex and i would probably need a big blog post to explain everything. Something i will do in the future. Anyhow, feedback is welcome.
HN · launched Feb 10, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views
Niche: programming languages and interpreters · 161 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -75% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 161 launches in programming languages and interpreters →
Could you build this?
No Designing and building a novel programming language with a custom compiler and a novel stateful garbage collector requires deep theoretical and systems-level compiler expertise.
What it would actually take: Building this requires a lexer, parser, intermediate representation (IR), optimizer, and backend code generator (likely LLVM or custom machine code generation), combined with low-level runtime memory management and GC state machines in C/C++ or Rust. The hardest part is correctly implementing sound type-checking, concurrency semantics, and an efficient stateful garbage collector without subtle race conditions or memory corruption bugs.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ARC (Automatic Reference Counting), ORC (Nim's memory management), Owner-based memory management
Concerns raised: Unclear how stateful GC differs from ARC/ORC, GC cannot match owner-based memory management performance, ARC has cycle problems, ORC has reported implementation issues, Benchmark methodology unclear (why measure scanning if no scanning occurs?)
Feature requests: Better documentation explaining stateful GC mechanism, Clarify distinction from existing memory management approaches
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 221 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #212 of 222 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 104 days after the earliest competitor.
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