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Deca, an LtU-friendly bare metal systems programming language

The Deca programming language is "a language designed to provide the advanced features of sophisticated, high-level programming languages while still programming as close as possible to the bare metal. It brings in the functional, object-oriented, and generic programming paradigms without requiring a garbage collector or a threading system, so programmers really only pay in performance for the features they use." The latter link provides a list of features that Deca does, will, and won't provide. Features provided include type inference, universally- and existentially- quantified types, and "a strong region-and-effect system that prohibits unsafe escaping pointers and double-free errors".

The Deca language and ideas behind it are documented in a thesis, The design and implementation of a modern systems programming language (PDF):

Low-level systems programming has remained one of the most consistently difficult tasks in software engineering, since systems programmers must routinely deal with details that programming-language and systems researchers have preferred to abstract away. At least partially, the difficulty arises from not applying the state of the art in programming-languages research to systems programming. I therefore describe the design and implementation of Deca, a systems language based on modern PL principles. Deca makes use of decades in programming-languages research, particularly drawing from the state of the art in functional programming, type systems, extensible data-types and subroutines, modularity, and systems programming-languages research. I describe Deca's feature-set, examine the relevant literature, explain design decisions, and give some of the implementation details for Deca language features. I have been writing a compiler for Deca to translate it into machine code, and I describe the overall architecture of this compiler and some of its details.

The source code for the Deca compiler, decac, is available here. The compiler is implemented in Scala and generates LLVM bytecode. (The author points out in the comments below that this implementation is a work in progress.)

The author of Deca is LtU member Eli Gottlieb, who back in 2008 posted in the forum asking for feedback on his language: Practical Bits of Making a Compiler for a New Language.

There's some more discussion of Deca over at Hacker News.