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Mach

A compiled systems language looking for contributions

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Hi HN,I'm the creator of Mach (https://github.com/octalide/mach or https://machlang.org). Two days ago, we finally achieved full self hosting. I wanted to make a post here to show off the language since this is a big milestone for us.## TL;DR about the language for those curious:- There are no external dependencies anywhere in the pipeline. This includes LLVM, libc bindings, or anything of the sort (save for the historical bootstrap compiler, which requires any C compiler and has been phased out completely).- Mach is extremely opinionated and very anti-magic. WYSIWYG is a core principal for the language. There are no hidden behaviors, implicit type conversions, or "automatic features". Simplicity and stripping away ambiguity are core principals that this language upholds.- Performance currently lags behind C by about a factor of only 4x at the time of writing, almost entirely due to the lack of deep compiler optimizations like autovectorization, which have not been fully implemented yet. Eventually, Mach will be at least on par with C.## Why did I build this?I love low level systems languages like C, Zig, Go, and (sometimes) Rust, but I wanted something that actively discourages "cleverness" in favor of long-term maintainability and overall clarity. Mach is highly opinionated and explicitly demands verbosity in ways that other languages are afraid to. Computers aren't magic, and code you write should not pretend they are. This project initially started out as a learning opportunity for myself, but grew into a fully featured language as time went on. There is still a lot I have to learn, however, and I'm excited to be able to do so as this project continues to grow into the future.## Why do I (the reader) care?If you like C, you'll probably like Mach. Mach takes heavy inspiration from the "vibe" of writing C, but improves on much of the syntax, lacks quite a few footguns, "unhides" a lot of internal mechanisms, and has a FAR better dependency management system.If you want to play around with a language that is fully capable of replacing C, and especially if you would like to contribute to its development, then PLEASE stop by and mess around.## Where should I go to check it out?The github repository has a link to our discord if you'd like to chat with myself or our few other regular users. My personal account has all of the tooling that exists as well as a few example repos if you feel inclined to try it out.## Will this project by dead in X months?I've been working on this in the background for over 2 years now. This is a long term project that I plan to maintain into the indefinite future, with or without a userbase. If you like the language at all, I highly encourage you to get involved in its development because it WILL be sticking around in some capacity forever.I know this was a bit "rambly", but let me just say that it's been a great joy to work on this project and I would love any and ALL opinions and contributions, ESPECIALLY if you hate the language or find a problem that needs fixing. Let me know what you guys think!

HN · launched Jun 8, 2026 · 32 upvotes (top 20%) · 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 ↗

Could you build this?

No Creating a self-hosting compiled systems programming language requires deep compiler design expertise, AST lowering, intermediate representations, register allocation, and machine code generation.

What it would actually take: A real implementation requires a hand-crafted lexer, parser, semantic analyzer with type checking and borrow/memory models, and a backend emitting LLVM IR or native assembly/C. Achieving self-hosting demands immense consistency and debugging rigor across bootstrapping iterations that LLMs cannot maintain over large codebases without deep human compiler expertise.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Rust, Zig, Go, C, Raku

Concerns raised: No built-in memory safety mechanisms like Rust, Performance 4x slower than C in worst case, Unclear value proposition vs Go or C, Lacks documentation clarity on design decisions, macOS support needs improvement

Feature requests: Advanced optimization passes for better performance, Weak macros system, Better documentation comparing to other languages

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 422 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #105 of 423 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 222 days after the earliest competitor.

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