The Ü Programming Language

https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/

by deterministic • 2 months ago

63 71 2 months ago

Just 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• 2 months ago

For those interested, I found code examples here: https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/tree/master/s...

deterministic2• 2 months ago

All good points. I have sent a link to this page to the author of the language (Panzerschrek).

rirze• 2 months ago

I 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.

Panzerschrek11• 2 months ago

Thanks 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• 2 months 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.

dexwiz• 2 months ago

Bold claims with no examples. Anyone can make a markdown chart with some pros and cons. Description by comparison is weak.

AdieuToLogic3• 2 months ago

11775 commits in about a year is... concerning.

ricardobeat3• 2 months ago

Something 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/contri...

AdieuToLogic3• 2 months ago

From 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).

Panzerschrek11• 2 months ago

No 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.

Stitch42232• 2 months ago

On a random day last month there where 17 commits, and commits happen daily by the same author. It’s true dedication.

Browsing through them requires understanding / translating Slovenian. Translation has never been cheaper, just recently the author has switched to English.

Example random day: https://github.com/Panzerschrek/U-00DC-Sprache/commits/maste...

lynguist• 2 months ago

This is Russian, written in Latin characters.

lmm• 2 months ago

Sounds pretty normal if someone's working full-time on it? That's what, 50/ working day, or about a commit every 10 minutes? Nothing to worry about.

Panzerschrek11• 2 months ago

It's 11775 commits in 10 years.

But in last several years I prefer committing frequently, basically each time I do a change which compiles successfully.

And it's all manual changes, no LLM (vibe-coding) is involved.

AdieuToLogic3• 1 month ago

It's 11775 commits in 10 years.

My concern is not the number of years, but instead the number of commits. It implies linguistic volatility and a lack of a coherent design and/or vision.

Where is the rationale which explains the voluminous number of commits?

bob0012• 2 months ago

The 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.

Panzerschrek11• 2 months ago

Could you explain please, what is exactly wrong with the README and maybe suggest, how to fix it?

qalmakka2• 2 months ago

Whenever 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...

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

bob0012• 2 months ago

There 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• 2 months ago

Are 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• 2 months ago

Not if you have a German keyboard.

zabzonk3• 2 months ago

Oh god, I once had to program in C++ on a French keyboard.

Panzerschrek11• 2 months ago

I 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.

theamk2• 2 months 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.

zabzonk3• 2 months 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.

theamk2• 2 months ago

     function 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

TheCycoONE• 2 months ago

It reads like affine types to me https://panzerschrek.github.io/U-00DC-Sprache-site/docs/en/r...

They borrowed heavily from Rust here.

nvr219• 2 months ago

This is clearly satire.

oofbey• 2 months ago

You underestimate the egos involved.

zitterbewegung• 2 months ago

How do I Google for this language……

dietr1ch• 2 months ago

It'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.

jdnier3• 2 months 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".

Panzerschrek11• 2 months ago

I 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• 2 months ago

I find the "Why choosing Ü?" table to be particularly amusing. Just cherry-picked language features where Ü happens to achieve all of them!

Panzerschrek11• 2 months ago

You 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.

jdnier3• 2 months ago

There was a "Show HN: Ü Programming Language" from the author last October.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45769161

jdnier3• 2 months ago

Some more resources from that post:

See 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/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/r...). If some topic isn't clear for you after reading the documentation, contact me and I can answer your questions.

librasteve2• 2 months ago

this homepage has snippets to die for https://raku.org/

andai• 2 months 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.

fleur-de-lotus• 2 months ago

Who are U to judge the name ?

bulbar• 2 months ago

Why 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.

Panzerschrek11• 2 months ago

I 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.

jona-f• 2 months ago

Now it's too late to change it.

Really? May I suggest to reconsider that? Are you still a fan of World War II Germany?

riidom• 2 months ago

I just think of it as some kind of armored shrek :)

self_awareness• 2 months ago

duck-typing in templates (without mandatory template type requirements specification)

"Some may call this junk. Me, I call them treasures."

rootlocus• 2 months ago

Using a font so close to Fraktur for a german letter is definitely an intentional choice if you want to evoke nazi imagery.

qalmakka2• 2 months ago

That, and also not realising that given the transparent background it's absolutely invisible with the dark theme. I didn't see it at all

okkdev• 2 months ago

Combined with the username Panzerschrek...

Panzerschrek11• 2 months ago

The 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.

ungut2• 2 months ago

Why 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.

Panzerschrek11• 2 months ago

Such 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• 2 months ago

Mmmh 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• 2 months ago

as an ü person i endorse it

lanycrost• 2 months ago

Guess 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.

1attice3• 2 months ago

Hi 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• 2 months ago

You should save face by editing in a '/sarcasm' as soon as possible.

1attice3• 2 months ago

I 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.

_s_a_m_• 2 months ago

Do we really need this? I'd rather improve the type checker of some heavily used existing language

renox• 2 months ago

1) 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/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.

The Ü Programming Language

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