Drew Devault, known for his work on the SWAY user environment, the ARC postal client, and the collaborative Sourcehut project, has recently unveiled the release of hare 0.24.0, a programming language. This announcement also included the introduction of new rules governing the formation of future versions. Notably, hare 0.24.0 marks the first official release, as previous iterations were not formally structured.
The language’s current build remains unstable, allowing for changes that may disrupt compatibility until a stable 1.0 version is established. This shift to a more structured development model aims to streamline the packaging process for distributions, as well as enhance user experience by facilitating testing and tracking of new features. Moving forward, new versions of hare will be released every three months following a format denoted as 0.yy.q, where YY represents the last two digits of the year and Q indicates the quarter of publication, with detailed change logs provided for each release.
Hare is positioned as a programming language similar to SI but with simplified syntax. The compiler and tools’ source code is open-source under the GPLV3 license, while the standard library code operates under the Mozilla public license (MPL). Designed for tackling low-level tasks such as developing operating systems, compilers, network applications, and system utilities that demand exceptional performance and precise control, Hare employs manual memory management and a static type system that mandates clear type assignments for variables.
Support for basic operating system interfaces, algorithms, protocols, regular expressions, and encryption capabilities is provided through the standard function library included with the minimum Runtime needed for application execution. Further development resources for graphical applications are available through projects like hare-wayland, as well as integration with tools like gtk, vulkan, opengl, Sdl2, and libui.