The Zena Programming Language

The Zena Programming Language

@zena-lang.dev

A new programming language for WebAssembly GC

128 followers58 following23 posts

The Zena Programming Language
@zena-lang.dev

📰 Small project update, since we were so busy that we missed our weekly blog posts: - Last week we moved dev to public GitHub - We made the tests over 4x faster! - Mostly compiler fixes - Memory usage is down by 10x in some cases! - This week is value types, arg explosion, & row polymorphism

View full thread
The Zena Programming Language
@zena-lang.dev

📰 Small project update, since we were so busy that we missed our weekly blog posts: - Last week we moved dev to public GitHub - We made the tests over 4x faster! - Mostly compiler fixes - Memory usage is down by 10x in some cases! - This week is value types, arg explosion, & row polymorphism

The Zena Programming Language
@zena-lang.dev

Records & tuples are true identity-less value types The compiler skips heap allocation in many cases, generalizing the multi-value return support Zena already had. Functions that take records/tuples now get compiled to taking the fields directly. The named-param pattern no longer allocates at all!

The Zena Programming Language
@zena-lang.dev

This brings new semantics for record types: - {x: i32} is a closed record with exactly `x` - {x: i32, ...} is an existential record with at least `x` - {x: i32, ...R} is row-generic with extra fields tracked by R Existential records are the most like JS objects: they can carry any extra fields.

The Zena Programming Language
@zena-lang.dev

This week has been all about moving the full development workflow to public GitHub. The first tasks was speeding up tests on GitHub CI, and we just got a full run down from 43min to 5min, with the tests only taking 4min !! 🏎️ 🏁 Lots of this is compiler work, so regular programs compile faster too!

The Zena Programming Language
@zena-lang.dev

Today we landed more Range support in the language and stdlib 🥳 - Iterating over ranges, with a fast-path in the compiler to emit the same bytecode as a plain C-style for loop - [] overrides on Array for slicing operations a..b is Zena's range syntax, very much like Rust. #wasm #webassembly

The Zena Programming Language reposted

Justin Fagnani
@justinfagnani.com

Working on code-image exports for the @zena-lang.dev playground. A new programming language in this era is going to need every possible sharing and viral-spread path to be as easy and pretty as possible. No copying into another tool to make nice looking code images.

The Zena Programming Language
@zena-lang.dev

New blog post on zena-lang.dev: Designing a Programming Language for the AI Era zena-lang.dev/blog/2026/09... Includes why I think a language good for humans and WebAssembly is good for AI, and why Zena is a project that's optimistic that humans have a place in software development.

zena-lang.devDesigning a Programming Language for the AI EraWhat makes a programming language effective when AI agents write, test, and review code, and why being optimized for WebAssembly is being optimized for AI.

The Zena Programming Language reposted

Justin Fagnani
@justinfagnani.com

I think I have an interesting mitigation to the function coloring problem for single-threaded async/await-style languages... I'm curious if anyone's tried this. It's like Python's asyncio .run() but supports nesting and scoped microtask queues...

The Zena Programming Language
@zena-lang.dev

Now that we've put Zena out there a bit, we're looking for collaborators of any sort. We especially need people to give feedback on the design choices from many different perspective: developer ergonomics, the type system, compiler architecture, etc. Anyone with any level of interest is welcome!

You are up to date.