Re:Ask HN: Are you writing your own programming language?
by empath75 on Thursday November 05, 2026 @08:45AM
(#50378981)
I like it. What’s the safety/memory story? How much of it would you say is Claude vs you at this point? How good is Claude at writing code in the language itself?
Re:Ask HN: Are you writing your own programming language?
by prologic on Thursday November 05, 2026 @08:50AM
(#50379037)
If by "How much is Claude vs. Me", I would honestly say it's all me, Claude just pattern-matched and wrote the code. And to answer your 2nd question, the host was written in Go initially, but progressively over the past year I got Claude to eventually get to a point where the language is now written in itself (self hosted).
So yes, Claude is able to write in Mu quite well -- But this isn't surprising, because I believe large language models sort of settle on the structure and patterns of languages and generalizes fairly well. So this kind of didn't surprise me at all.
If you have a pok around the site, you'll see why. Mu is deliberately very small and minimal. I've also chosen not to implement floating point arithmetic, because I wanted to see if I could get Mu programs to run on micro controllers one day, which many of them don't have FPU(s) -- especially the smaller ones.
At this point, it's mostly for fun, educational purposes and an attempt to build the smallest, but generally useful language with a good balance of dynamic performance, native code compilation, self hosting and a language that is both easy to learn and easy to understand it's design and implementation.
I call it Mu (µ) lang. You can find it at https://mu-lang.org
I've also experimented with building a full UNIX(ish) OS and Kernel in Mu itself. So that means, about ~2k Assembly, the rest in Mu. It's at about a 80/20 (Mu/Asm) and works fairly well!