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- #Programming Philosophy
- #Garbage Collection
- #Systems Language
- AOT systems language that compiles directly to x86-64 with a philosophy of treating world failures as data and bugs as fatal errors.
- Original garbage collector had critical flaws: it moved live objects on macOS/Windows, reclaimed almost no memory, and caused server crashes after 828 requests; rewriting it enabled stable handling of 20,000 requests.
- Many bugs existed unnoticed due to structural issues like untestable heap size, which was fixed by making heap size a compile-time knob, revealing multiple backend and memory management errors.
- Language design prioritized immediate error detection, catching mistakes quickly (e.g., miscompilations, uninitialized stack reads) and enshrining the thesis that 'bugs are fatal' and 'world failures are data'.
- Claude (the AI) contributed significantly to compiler improvements, including garbage collector rewrite, first-class op references, and HTTP stack, highlighting effectiveness in fixing implementation flaws over philosophy changes.