The Vale Programming Language! Learn more at vale.dev/
Joined July 2020
- Tweets 33
- Following 1
- Followers 253
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1 Photos and videos
Vale retweeted
28 Aug 2025
Just posted a new article! verdagon.dev/blog/group-borr…
"Group Borrowing: Zero-Cost Memory Safety with Fewer Restrictions"
TL;DR: Nick Smith's epic approach to better borrow checking. Take a look!
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With this, new languages like Vale are one step closer to being able to reuse the entire Rust ecosystem!
verdagon.dev/blog/exploring-…
"Crossing the Impossible FFI Boundary, and My Gradual Descent Into Madness"
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If we're right, then this could pave the way towards newer languages calling into and building upon Rust, in the same way C built upon C!
verdagon.dev/blog/exploring-…
The most surprising part is that we're sending non-#[repr(C)]'d types into C. Heresy, but effective!
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Behold! Higher RAII, and the Seven Arcane Uses of Linear Types: verdagon.dev/blog/higher-rai…
It turns out, you unlock pretty sorcerous powers when you make it so only specific functions can destroy a certain type.
Also, it's very weird that a language could help with caching.
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New article! "Borrow checking, RC, GC, and the Eleven (!) Other Memory Safety Approaches"
verdagon.dev/grimoire/grimoi…
If anyone knows any more approaches, speak up, would love to expand that list!
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Vale retweeted
11 Jul 2023
Regions are also a way to make colorless fearless structured concurrency (a mouthful I know), without going all in on a Rust-like borrow checker. verdagon.dev/blog/seamless-f…
Now that we have a working regions prototype, I can finally start working on concurrency!
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Vale retweeted
11 Jul 2023
This has been a long time coming! Regions are Vale's "killer feature", they let us write in a normal unrestricted way then incrementally optimize. This lets the user choose whether they their is flexible like Java, fast like Rust, or any point in between.
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At long last, the first prototype of immutable region borrowing in Vale! verdagon.dev/blog/first-regi…
This technique removes Vale's memory safety overhead by making borrowing and shared mutability work well together.
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Vale retweeted
23 Jun 2023
Blend #2: Single-threaded RC (Nim), plus region borrowing (Vale) [1], plus copy types (C#, Swift).
Enforced by static analysis checker, of course.
(I think we might also be able to do contiguous ref-counted arrays, but still looking into that.)
[1] verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-…
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How to make a language like C memory-safe without borrow checking, RC, or tracing GC. Enjoy!
verdagon.dev/blog/vale-memor…
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We often talk about zero-overhead memory safety, but no language has ever really achieved it. Once we use a more holistic definition, we see that memory safety always has a run-time cost. The only question is: where do we want to pay it?
verdagon.dev/blog/myth-zero-…
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Vale retweeted
15 Jun 2023
Linear types (and the higher RAII they enable) are pretty huge. Any time you say "Ah, I forgot to do X", that's a bug linear types help prevent. I wrote about this in verdagon.dev/blog/higher-rai… and have been discovering more and more uses for them ever since!
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It turns out, one doesn't need borrow checking, RC, or GC to get memory safe single ownership! And with a little twist, we can enable compile-time guarantees that no mainstream language has been able to achieve.
verdagon.dev/blog/single-own…
Enjoy!
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One of those little weird little language details that can have potentially *huge* development time benefits: generics and type erasure.
verdagon.dev/blog/generics-c…
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Vale retweeted
1 Jun 2023
Fun fact: All these techniques we're designing for Vale could easily be applied to reference counted languages too.
This (plus regions) is why I think RC will make a huge comeback in the next decade, even over tracing GC.
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Revelations about where efficient memory safety actually comes from! verdagon.dev/blog/linear-typ…
TL;DR: We can combine linear types with other memory safety approaches (like gen refs or ref counting) to reduce overhead down to zero where we want.
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There's a *lot* that goes on under the hood for Vale's region borrowing. But hey, nobody said it would be easy to make a completely new memory safety paradigm!
verdagon.dev/blog/making-reg…
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The Vale compiler just passed 100,000 lines!
Some lessons learned from the endeavor so far: verdagon.dev/blog/first-100k…
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An analysis of why GC is so fast to develop with, why borrow checking is often slower, and everything in-between. Enjoy!
verdagon.dev/blog/when-to-us…
"How Memory Safety Approaches Speed Up and Slow Down Development Velocity"
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A tale of how a 2am realization led to discovering the fourth memory safety paradigm!
verdagon.dev/blog/making-reg…
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