A small systems language with automatic memory safety, real concurrency, and a batteries-included standard library.
Glide is a compiled systems language. It gives you native performance through a portable C backend, memory safety without a garbage collector and without lifetime annotations, and real M:N concurrency. The whole compiler is written in Glide itself.
Linux / macOS — installs to ~/.local/bin, no sudo:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/glide-lang/Glide/main/tools/install.sh | bashWindows — PowerShell, installs under %LOCALAPPDATA% and updates your PATH:
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/glide-lang/Glide/main/tools/install.ps1 | iexBoth fetch the latest release automatically. The default is a ~3 MB binary that
compiles your code with the gcc/clang already on your machine. Want a
toolchain that needs nothing else installed? Add --bundle (bash) or -Bundle
(PowerShell) — the self-contained build ships its own C backend. Prebuilt
archives for every platform are also on the
releases page.
fn main() {
println!("hello, glide");
}
glide run hello.glide # build and run
glide build hello.glide # produce a standalone binaryglide new <name> scaffolds a project; inside it, glide build reads the
glide.glide manifest and produces a single static executable that runs
anywhere on that OS/arch — no runtime, no shared libraries to ship.
Memory is managed for you. A value is owned by default, moves when you hand it off, and frees itself at the end of its scope, so the common case needs no manual allocation or cleanup — and use-after-move and double-free are caught at compile time. Borrows, a manual heap, and arenas stay available for the moments you want to take control.
Errors are values rather than exceptions: results and options carried in the type system, propagated with light postfix operators. Concurrency is built in: spawn lightweight coroutines and pass data over typed channels. The standard library ships networking with a full HTTP stack, its own TLS 1.2/1.3 and constant-time crypto, JSON, compression, a package manager, a formatter, and a language server.
Glide links no third-party C library. Its TLS, crypto, HTTP, and compression
are written in Glide, so a build depends only on a C compiler and libc — and
glide build produces a fully static binary by default (musl on Linux) that
runs anywhere with no .so to install. The bundle build goes one step
further and embeds its own C backend, so it compiles your code with nothing
else on the system at all. Cross-compiling to another OS/arch fetches only the
target's libc, once, on first use.
- TUTORIAL.md — a guided walkthrough from install to a running program.
- LANGUAGE.md — the full language reference.
- DEVELOPING.md — working on the compiler itself.
MIT.