The Goose Programming Language
- ID
- 39239
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 25 Oct 2026, 3:06 AM
- Fetched
- 25 Oct 2026, 11:48 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://aardappel.github.io/goose/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 25 Oct 2026, 11:48 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
Goose is a proposed memory-safe systems language that eliminates the heap entirely: every dynamic value lives inline on compiler-managed data stacks, with no GC, no reference counting, no destructors, and no lifetime annotations or unsafe blocks. The project page claims, across sixteen benchmarks, 3.3x the speed of idiomatic C++, 1.16x hand-optimized C++, and 1.12x the best safe Rust, at 1.9x/1.3x/1.2x less memory, plus features like variable-size enums, 1/2/4-byte relative references that double as a serialization format, and threads that share nothing. It drew 275 points and 179 comments on Hacker News.
Why it matters
The numbers are self-published on the author's own site from the author's own benchmark suite, so treat 3.3x and 1.16x as claims to verify, not facts — nothing here justifies rewriting a service. The transferable ideas are concrete even if you never write Goose: 1/2/4-byte relative offsets that make a data structure its own file format (save = write, load = read + verification pass), enums sized to the active variant instead of the largest, and inline nested records (a 160-byte C++ record becoming 29 bytes with no allocation). If you are choosing between C++ and Rust today, this is a reason to watch for an independent replication, not a reason to switch.
Discussion angle
Ask what would make these benchmarks believable: the page cites sixteen benchmarks and ratios against three baselines, but no third-party harness or reproduction instructions in the text. What would you need to see — independent runs, published benchmark source, a real program ported to Goose — before taking a new language's 1.16x-over-hand-optimized-C++ claim seriously?