Hew Engineering Journal

Hew 0.6.2: safer values, steadier services

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 01:48:41 GMT

Edit parsed configuration without changing its source value, then see how Hew 0.6.2 carries the same actor reference across local and remote services.

Hew 0.6.1: typed configuration and confined services

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 18:00:00 GMT

Check deployment settings at build time, reuse generic closures and give an actor access to one directory.

A tour of Hew 0.6: files, concurrent work and services

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Start with a small file tool, then follow the language features that let it grow into a service with owned resources, workers and typed protocols.

Hew 0.6.0: concurrent work with ordinary calls

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Build a small file tool with fork, await and typed failures, then see what changes when work suspends or is cancelled.

Closing the Gaps: std Imports Compile Native, HashMap Indexing, and Idiomatic Examples

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:00:00 GMT

A run of fixes that make the v0.5 surface something a real program can lean on — std.fs and std.encoding.json reaching native codegen, m[k] indexing on HashMap, by-value generic methods, and a language guide so the examples actually model idiomatic Hew.

Two ways to be generic: monomorphisation, and the day abstract types lowered without one

Sat, 30 May 2026 16:00:00 GMT

How Hew lowers generics, told as the evolution it actually was — from stamping out one mangled LLVM function per instantiation, through unifying dispatch under a single call authority, to representing an abstract type parameter directly in MIR so a generic body can lower once even when its type is never made concrete.

Abstract type parameters with value witnesses, and a receive ABI that can borrow

Sat, 30 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Generics that lower without a concrete type yet, an actor receive path that takes a non-owning borrow of the message, and the smaller control-flow pieces — const globals, bare loop, break/continue — I'd been putting off.

No GC, no double-free: ownership, copy-on-write strings, and fail-loud traps

Fri, 29 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

How Hew's memory model actually works underneath — single ownership with compiler-inserted drops, strings as copy-on-write refcounted values over a header-aware allocator, and arithmetic that traps with distinct exit codes instead of wrapping silently.

String Becomes Copy-on-Write and the Last Legacy Dispatch Path Is Retired

Thu, 28 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Two days on ownership — retiring the old HashMap/HashSet dual-dispatch, turning `string` into a copy-on-write refcounted value, and adding `&T` borrow markers that fail closed when you try to clone the wrong way.

Collections get a real ABI, closures get capture inference, and dispatch goes through one authority

Tue, 26 May 2026 18:00:00 GMT

Two days on the substrate under generic data structures — what a layout descriptor actually carries, why the closure checker now infers move vs borrow, and the moment I noticed three different pieces of the compiler each had their own opinion about how a method call lowers.

Hardening the Seams Instead of Adding Surface

Sun, 24 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Two days of making the compiler refuse to lie — fail-closed gates that reject unsupported shapes at compile time, a memory-safety sweep through the runtime, and a `hew check` that finally runs the real pipeline.

Talking between nodes: the CBOR wire envelope and a SWIM cluster that gossips

Sat, 23 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The distributed substrate for v0.5 — replacing a hand-rolled binary wire format with a CBOR envelope described by a CDDL schema, deleting 2,498 lines of wire.rs, and giving the cluster a phi-accrual failure detector that adapts instead of a fixed timeout. Plus cross-node sends that stay type-checked.

Generators get a state machine, the cluster learns to gossip, and the wire format flips to CBOR

Fri, 22 May 2026 18:00:00 GMT

Two dense days grouped together — generator lowering finally has a state record and cross-yield liveness, the SWIM detector goes phi-accrual, and I delete the 2498-line hand-built wire format in favour of a CBOR envelope with a CDDL schema.

State as a type: how machine declarations become tagged-union dispatch

Fri, 22 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The machine construct in detail — what the front end checks before a single instruction is emitted, how a state declaration becomes a tagged-union LLVM layout, and why I'd rather reject an illegal transition at compile time than catch it at runtime. Includes the parts that don't fully work yet.

Generic Enums End-to-End and the Day for and while Finally Lower

Thu, 21 May 2026 22:00:00 GMT

Generic enum values now make it all the way to LLVM, so I get to delete the not-yet-supported guard that's been standing in for them. Match over payload-bearing variants works, and for and while loops lower to real control flow for the first time.

State Machines Reach Codegen and Closures Become First-Class Values

Wed, 20 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Machine declarations used to type-check and then stop — no runtime behaviour. Now they lower all the way through to native code. Plus pipe-form closures, a canonical pointer spelling, and a TCP-as-Stream bridge.

Supervisors That Wire Themselves and Crash Hooks With Real Trap Codes

Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

A supervisor declaration now lowers to a spawn-and-wire bootstrap that returns a typed pid, and a crash hook can finally see the trap code that killed a child. The bottom half is real; the top half is where I am today. Underneath, int and uint are gone and module-qualified calls like math.sqrt resolve.

Sends are method calls, crashes carry codes: the actor and supervision model

Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

A walk down the actor stack in v0.5. Why I deleted the `<-` send operator, how a method call lowers to spawn/send/ask through an execution context, and how supervision fires `#[on(crash)]` with the real trap code.

WASM parity for free, almost: four targets from one MIR and the seams that weren't free

Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Native and wasm32 share the same MIR and the same textual LLVM IR — they only diverge at the TargetMachine. That makes most of WASM support genuinely free. This is about the parts that weren't — traps, blocking recv, timers, and a use-after-free that only exists on WASM.

From Parse Tree to Running Actor

Mon, 18 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

Actors stopped being syntax today. I wired actor method calls down to spawn/send/ask, made init and the on(start)/on(stop) hooks fire at the right moments, and threaded an execution context through the whole thing so the reply channel has somewhere to live.

Retiring the C++ Backend and Teaching the Compiler to Monomorphise

Sun, 17 May 2026 20:00:00 GMT

The day the pipeline became Rust top to bottom — over fifteen hundred C++/MLIR files deleted, and generics finally grew a spine through the IR ladder.

Decide in MIR, carry in nothing: why we deleted the MLIR backend before shipping a binary

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The backend cutover for v0.5 — the borrowed-String double-free that took six revisions to kill, why each revision grew the C++ walker registry, and how I convinced myself it was safe to delete a 1,568-file MLIR subtree and lower straight from MIR to LLVM IR.

Making integers honest and making failure loud: widths, records, and trap-on-overflow

Sat, 16 May 2026 18:30:00 GMT

Today the value layer stops being vague. I gave integers real widths and platform-sized isize/usize, wired records all the way through with auto-derived markers, and made arithmetic that overflows trap instead of silently lying.

Deleting the Send Operator to Make the Actor Model Honest

Fri, 15 May 2026 18:00:00 GMT

First day of the v0.5 rewrite. I tore out the `<-` send operator and the spawn-lambda form, and spent the rest of the day deciding what the actor and machine surface should look like before a single line of it lowers to a binary.

Launching Hew

Sun, 10 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Hew puts actor state, supervision, protocol shape, and cleanup into the compiler instead of scattering them across conventions.

The Double-Free and the Sized Integers

Thu, 07 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Two breaking changes in v0.4.0 that were really just cleaning up things I should have gotten right earlier — explicit teardown for resource types, and int uniformity in the stdlib.

Releasing v0.4.0 — LSP goto-definition, stdlib fixes, and WASM coverage

Fri, 01 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

LSP transitive goto-definition, module search-path documentation, eval WASM coverage, URL percent-encoding, and a binary-safe fs.try_read_bytes.

The JIT REPL Can Survive a Crash Now

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The in-process JIT path was fast but had no floor — any bug in generated code killed the session. Here's what we did about it.

Comments Are Not Optional

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The formatter was silently dropping inline comments — not crashing, not warning, just eating them. Seven variants of the same missing flush call, and how wiring LSP formatting shook them all out.

Hardening the Standard Library's Error Paths

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:00:00 GMT

After making the compiler fail-closed, the same scrutiny hit the stdlib — thirty commits fixing sentinel values that lied, parsers with no depth limits, and a mutex that silently swallowed messages.

Making the Compiler Fail Closed

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:00:00 GMT

The v0.3.0 codegen hardening in detail — what the AST fallback was hiding, how it hid it, and why removing it uncovered a range loop signedness bug I had no idea existed.

Releasing v0.3.0 — Structural Bounds, In-Process REPL, and Stdlib Depth

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Structural trait bounds now work without explicit impl declarations. Plus an in-process REPL, Rc, typed network errors, SMTP one-shot helpers, and a large stdlib surface expansion.

Releasing v0.2.2 — Observer Discovery, Reply Channel Fix, WebSocket Server

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:00:00 GMT

hew-observe auto-discovers running programs over unix sockets. Plus a codegen fix that eliminated a class of actor crashes, and WebSocket server support in the stdlib.

Releasing v0.2.1 — One Binary, Hardened Runtime

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

hew-codegen is gone: the compiler is a single binary now. Plus a major runtime hardening pass, generic channels, and 562 E2E tests.

Wiring the QUIC Mesh

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

How the Node API actually works — QUIC transport, distributed reply channels, and cross-node service discovery. The language surface shipped in v0.1.9; the runtime took another four days.

Releasing v0.2.0 — Named Receivers and Generic impl Blocks

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

The self keyword is gone: actors use this, impl methods use named receivers, and generic impl blocks finally work.

Teaching an LLM a Language It Has Never Seen

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fine-tuning a 4B parameter model to write valid Hew code, using the compiler as the test suite and a 780M iGPU as the training rig.

MicroGPT — From 1,092 Lines to 677

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most of the gaps microgpt found got fixed within the week. Here's the refactoring sequence — commit by commit — and how close the output matches Python.

What MicroGPT Found — 13 Bugs and 340 Lines of Workarounds

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The point of porting a real program isn't to have a GPT. It's to find out where your language breaks. MicroGPT found 13 compiler issues and revealed that 31% of the code was working around language gaps.

Porting Karpathy's MicroGPT to Hew

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I needed a real program to stress-test the compiler. A 120-line GPT turned into 1,092 lines of Hew, and a third of those lines were working around compiler bugs.

Releasing v0.1.9 — FreeBSD Support

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

No new language features — just making Hew build and run on FreeBSD, which meant writing a kqueue poller and unifying the linker flags.

Wire Types and Distributed Actors

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMT

How Hew's wire types, remote spawning, and cluster formation came together across seven implementation phases — and where distributed supervision still falls short.

Releasing v0.1.8 — Literal Coercion, Indirect Enums, and LLVM 22

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The type system does more work so you do less — range-checked literal coercion, recursive enums, and generators that use real coroutines.

LSP, Tree-Sitter, and Editor Support

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The LSP, the tree-sitter grammar, the TextMate regex soup, and the six-repo pipeline I have to remember to run every time a keyword changes.

Releasing v0.1.7 — Debugging and Collection Ergonomics

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two features and a Docker fix — you can finally step through Hew programs in a debugger.

Releasing v0.1.6 — State Machines, Wire System, and a Lot of Cleanup

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:00:00 GMT

What started as "add machine types" turned into 64 PRs, a wire system redesign, and 1,344 lines removed from codegen.

State Machines and Duration Literals

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Actors keep reinventing state machines badly, so I gave them a real one. Also, duration literals so you can stop counting nanosecond zeroes.

The Package Manager and Ecosystem Libraries

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I didn't want "cool language, no libraries" to be anyone's first impression, so I built a package manager, a registry, and six libraries before v0.1.0.

Building the Website and the Playground

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

How the website and playground came together — two syntax highlighting pipelines, the Rust frontend compiled to WASM, and why breaking the grammar breaks everything at once.

Releasing v0.1.5 — Static Linking and Benchmarks

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:00:00 GMT

I wrote some algorithm examples, profiled the generated code, and discovered the codegen had problems I'd been ignoring.

Type System Improvements After the Initial Release

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

The type checker kept rejecting programs that worked fine at runtime. Here's what it took to fix that — literal coercion, casts, bytes, indirect enums, and array-to-Vec.

Releasing v0.1.4 — False Warnings, Over-Engineering, and Windows

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

False warnings, deleted abstractions, and a Windows build that finally works. Five releases in three days.

Releasing v0.1.3 — Packaging and Signing Fixes

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:00:00 GMT

I actually tried installing what I built. Most of it was broken.

Releasing v0.1.2 — Build System Fixes

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

A small one — two build system fixes that only matter if you're packaging Hew, not writing it.

Tagging v0.1.0 and Building the Release Pipeline

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

I removed the alpha suffix and immediately had to build a release pipeline that could actually ship the thing.

Releasing v0.1.1 — Codegen Fixes and FFI Linking

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first release worked well enough to reveal the next layer of problems. This one fixes them.

Releasing v0.1.0 — Initial Public Release

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Removed the alpha suffix, ran the pipeline, watched it turn green. That's v0.1.0.

Fixing Generics and Adding Verification

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fixing generic monomorphization collisions, wiring codegen to the type checker, adding MLIR verification, and building IR visualization tools.

Pre-Alpha Syntax Cleanup

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Removing seven syntax forms, adding named arguments, fixing the formatter, and collapsing three crates into one before tagging v0.1.0-alpha.

Running Valgrind on Everything

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Systematic memory validation with valgrind — from 1,800 bytes definitely lost to zero, fixing reply channel leaks, supervisor cleanup, and a nested shutdown double-free.

Closing the Gaps

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Walking through the Hew pipeline to fix broken tail calls, unregistered defer, SQL injection in the stdlib, duration literals stuck at the lexer, and 120 new tests.

Replacing FlatBuffers with MessagePack

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Ripping out FlatBuffers, splitting the standard library namespace, adding a package manager, and building an export macro system.

Grammar Tooling and the MLIR Dialect Overhaul

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Building a TextMate grammar, replacing LLVM IR with typed Hew dialect ops, and debugging a Tailwind naming collision.

Testing the Language on Myself

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Writing fifteen programs from scratch to find UX problems, then fixing error messages, adding else-if chains, and killing false positives.

Generators and Actor Mailboxes

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:00:00 GMT

Spec v0.6.1 added three generator forms to Hew, including one that streams values across actor boundaries through the mailbox.

Removing Six Syntax Redundancies

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:00:00 GMT

The v0.6.0 spec revision removed six redundancies and three dead-end features without adding anything new.

How Fast Is It, Actually

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Benchmarking Hew against gcc -O2, setting up CI, and adding generators to the spec.

Throwing Away the First Compiler

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Why Hew ended up with two compilers — the Rust/Inkwell attempt, the pivot to C++/MLIR, and rebuilding the pipeline in 12 hours.

Three Spec Revisions in Three Days

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Three major spec revisions driven by implementation and user testing — ownership rethink, messaging overhaul, and syntax consolidation.

Building the Actor Runtime

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From one-thread-per-actor to M:N work-stealing — designing Hew's actor runtime, mailboxes, and supervision trees.

From cargo init to a Running Compiler

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Building Hew's lexer, parser, type checker, IR, and C codegen in under two hours. Fibonacci printed 55.

Writing a Spec Before Writing Code

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Hew started with a 394-line specification, a 1,076-line gap analysis, and four research documents — before any compiler code existed.