The Goose Programming Language

A memory-safe systems language with no heap allocator, garbage collector, or lifetime annotations. In this repository's benchmarks, Goose runs faster than C++ and Rust while using less memory. Tutorial · Reference · Specification · Packages · Samples · Benchmarks · Standard library Goose has syntax familiar to C and Rust programmers, but there is no heap. Every dynamic value lives inline on a data stack managed by the compiler. Growth advances a pointer, and memory is freed when its scope ends. The language's type and lifetime rules make this memory model safe to use. Why Goose Faster than C++ and than safe Rust, while memory safe. Over sixteen benchmarks Goose runs at 3.3x the speed of idiomatic C++, 1.16x hand-optimized C++ and 1.12x the best safe Rust, on 1.9x, 1.3x and 1.2x less memory (results). These gains come from Goose's data layouts and memory model. No allocator, no GC, no reference counting, no destructors. Memory is a handful of data stacks that the compiler assigns statically. Freeing a million-element structure is one store, however deeply it nests. Growth preserves references. A reference into a growing array stays valid for as long as the array does. You keep typed references where C++ must reserve and safe Rust uses u32 indices in the corresponding benchmarks. Memory safe with zero annotations. No lifetime syntax, no aliasing or exclusivity rules, no unsafe. The compiler infers what every reference is rooted in and rejects references that could outlive their owners. Nested data stays inline. A string, an array of strings, a record with variable-size fields and an array of those records are each one contiguous block with no pointer in it. A record that is 160 bytes and an allocation in C++ is 29 bytes and none in Goose. Enums that cost what they hold. Variable-mode ADTs give each value its own variant's size rather than the largest one's: 4x less memory and 2x the speed of a Rust enum on the benchmark that exercises it. Links narrower than pointers. A relative reference stores a typed, checked link as a 1, 2 or 4-byte offset. Structures built from them are position independent, so your data structure is already its file format: saving is a write, loading is a read plus a verification pass that rejects hostile bytes. Everything is built in place, guaranteed. A value is constructed at its final destination through any depth of calls. items.push(parse(line)) writes the parsed record straight into the array, and returning a growable array by …