I built a compiled programming language as a solo founder. took 8 months. here's the honest version.
okay so i want to share something i've been sitting on for a while.
i built a programming language. like, an actual compiled language. from scratch. alone.
and before you ask, no i'm not a compiler engineer, no i don't have a CS phd, no there was no team. just me, rust, llvm, and honestly a lot of moments where i thought this was a genuinely bad idea.
it started because i kept writing the same backend code over and over. auth middleware, crud routes, docker files, ssl config, every single project, same 200 lines, different repo. Frustrating many times. the kind where you open a new project and just stare at the blank file for a minute before sighing and copy-pasting the old stuff again.
so the idea was, what if the language just... did that for you. you write a schema, you get a running api. compiled, type-safe, no boilerplate.
stupid? probably. i did it anyway.
the language is called Doolang. it compiles down to native binaries through llvm. i benchmarked it, 1.38 million requests per second on plain text. 1.27M on json. i know those numbers sound fake. they're not, i'll have the full reproducible benchmark repo out next week if you want to run it yourself.
it's open source: github.com/nynrathod/doolang
here's the part i actually want to talk about though.
building something this "ambitious" alone is weird. there's no one to tell you you're on the right track. no one to split the hard parts with. some weeks i made real progress. other weeks i was debugging llvm IR at 1am questioning every decision i'd made. may be no one will use it.
but there's also something that happens when it's just you, you make the language simple because YOU have to understand all of it. no room for overengineering when there's no one else to maintain it. i think that constraint actually made Doolang better.
i also built DooCloud on top of it, that's the product side, schema to live production api in under 5 minutes, whole different story. but doolang is open source and that's what i want to share here.
if you've ever had an idea that felt too big for one person and talked yourself out of it, i don't know, maybe this is useful. took me 8 months of real work to prove to myself it wasn't impossible. still a lot left to build.
would love to hear if anyone's done something similar or wants to poke around the repo.
