The Jakt Programming Language
Published on: 2025-05-27 18:34:26
The Jakt programming language
Jakt is a memory-safe systems programming language.
It currently transpiles to C++.
NOTE: The language is under heavy development.
NOTE If you're cloning to a Windows PC (not WSL), make sure that your Git client keeps the line endings as
. You can set this as a global config via git config --global core.autocrlf false .
Usage
The transpilation to C++ requires clang . Make sure you have that installed.
jakt file.jakt ./build/file
Building
See here.
Goals
Memory safety Code readability Developer productivity Executable performance Fun!
Memory safety
The following strategies are employed to achieve memory safety:
Automatic reference counting
Strong typing
Bounds checking
No raw pointers in safe mode
In Jakt, there are three pointer types:
T (Strong pointer to reference-counted class T .)
(Strong pointer to reference-counted class .) weak T (Weak pointer to reference-counted class T . Becomes empty on pointee destruction.)
(Weak pointer t
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