Leaf: A New "Soon To Be Great" Programming Language

Leaf was announced this weekend, which is described by its developer as "a soon to be great new programming language." The language has been in development for one year and leverages LLVM as its compiler back-end.

Being based on LLVM, the programming language that appears to be the work of a lone individual has been able to make a lot of progress on the compiler end. LLVM takes care of the heavy lifting with its multiple execution models, code optimizations, arbitrary bit-size integers, exception handling, and Clang's IR emitting/dumping support. The developer of Leaf announced his language this weekend on the LLVM developers' list.

The project's website, LeafLang.org, describes the "rich language" with having inferred and partial typing, tuples, safe implicit type conversion, out-of-order declarations, and closures. The features aren't very different from other languages and the syntax isn't anything remarkable, so we'll see in due time if Leaf manages to turn into a "great" and used language.