NOTE: Vale is archived and no longer being worked on, but its spirit (and code!) lives on in the new Valen programming language, which is Vale with a new memory safety approach plus Rust interop. See The Golden Spike, and Resurrecting the Vale(n) Programming Language. This repo will always remain up for posterity.

Vale

Vale is a programming language that's aims to be not only fast and memory-safe, but also easy and flexible.

• Fast: Vale is AOT compiled to LLVM, statically-typed, and uses the new generational references technique for memory safety with speed and flexibility, and will soon have region borrow checking to make it even faster.
• Safe: It is the safest native language, thanks to generational references and Fearless FFI.
• Easy: Vale has memory-safe single ownership without garbage collection or a borrow checker, which makes it easy to write safe, fast code.

See http://vale.dev/ for more information on the language, and see our treasure trove of working examples, grouped by functionality.

Building a Vale Program

1. Download the latest binary from https://github.com/ValeLang/Vale/releases
2. Unzip it into, for example, ~/Vale, and cd into it.
3. Make a file hello.vale containing some vale code, like exported func main() { println("Hello world!"); }
4. Compile a program: ./valec build mymod=hello.vale --output_dir target
5. Run the program: target/main, and you should see the output Hello world!

Learning Vale

See the Guide for how to use Vale.

Building the compiler itself

For instructions for building the compiler itself, see Building the Compiler.

For an overview of the project structure, see Compiler Overview.

Editor plugins

• VSCode plugin: Syntax-highlighting and basic autocompletion.
• Vim plugin: Syntax-highlighting

Thank you to all of our sponsors!

• Arthur Weagel
• Kiril Mihaylov
• Radek Miček
• Geomitron
• Chiuzon
• Felix Scholz
• Joseph Jaoudi
• Luke Puchner-Hardman
• Jonathan Zielinski
• Albin Kocheril Chacko
• Enrico Zschemisch
• Svintooo
• Tim Stack
• Alon Zakai
• Alec Newman
• Sergey Davidoff
• Ian (linuxy)
• Ivo Balbaert
• Pierre Curto
• Love Jesus
• J. Ryan Stinnett
• Cristian Dinu
• Florian Plattner

Notes

Vale started in January 2013, and back then we called it "VLang", though there's now another language with that name. We then called it GelLLVM, in honor of Gel, the first language to offer constraint references. Since then, we've settled on the name "Vale". Note that Vale and Vala are two different languages.