Motivation #

Q is a programming language under development that aims to fill the gap between C and Go while building upon the safety mechanisms that languages like Austral and Rust have demonstrated. Go's implementation details like the garbage collector make it difficult to be used in latency sensitive environments like kernel or game development and also complicate an efficient foreign function interface. However, the language itself is extremely well-designed when it comes to readability. Programs are written only once but they must be read many more times by developers around the globe and future generations trying to decipher the backbones of our software landscape. I want to combine the simplicity and readability of Go with a more low-level approach to memory safety so that we have a systems programming language that is both safe and efficient but also easy to understand for future readers.

Q is also a code generation framework that aims to produce raw machine code for multiple architectures, similar to LLVM. Since it is still a very young project compared to LLVM's 22 years of development, it will take time to reach a similar level of runtime performance for the generated executables. However, when looking at the compiler efficiency, the benchmarks show that many of the common compilers used in the industry are inefficient and that there is a lot of room for improvement. The Q compiler is currently the fastest optimizing compiler. While there are many optimization passes that still need to be implemented, I am confident that the performance impact of future passes can be reduced to a minimum. This project aims to raise the bar for compiler efficiency and demonstrate the possible improvements.