Welcome to Hachi!!

Greetings and welcome to Hachi!

A quick personal intro:

• My name is Mike Curnow, Software Engineer & Programming Teacher turned Cybersecurity Architect and Entrepreneur.
• I run Defiant Networks, Inc., where we’re working on The Next generation of the internet.
• I imagine my kids programming in Hachi one day. That’d be sick.

Ok, so now that we have that out of the way, let’s get into the elephant in the room, and that is:

“Why another language?”

Well I didn’t find what I was looking when tackling a niche use case, that simple. I literally just wanted a way to some weird stuff with a grouping of C and C++ projects and binding things together in a frankenstein way. This turned into a bunch of search-induced rabbit holes, where eventually I stumbled across a (now) defunct but very awesome language called Pinecone. It was really cool, AND it seemed to help me with all of my weird needs almost perfectly. Unfortunately the language has since languished, almost lost in the ether, and left in the dust since early 2017. But I found it, I loved it and loved what the author seemed to be going for, and decided to take the things I enjoyed from Pinecone to make something new, and grow this language myself under the name “Hachi” to ultimately create the dream language which I PERSONALLY want it to be and PERSONALLY enjoy coding in.

So yeah, Hachi aims to be that magical language I often imagined to make my work much easier. Instead of “Move Fast and Break Things”, this language aims to help me “Move Fast and Make Things”. If I’m the only person in the world who uses it, I’ll still be happy, as I originally created this for a one-off use case and it has since become a labor of love. However, I do believe my desire to create performant backend and server-side applications in a very simple way without the intimidating C/C++ ecosystem is shared among others and not something I alone possess. And before anyone asks, yes I use Hachi for serious projects.

Basically I wanted to do complicated things easier, and in a way that was intuitive to me personally. I wanted something that I liked, and now I have it.

What exactly is a “Hachi”?

Hachi is:

• Short for “Hachiko” which means “Sir/Mr. Eight” in Japanese, and is my dog’s name (yes, I named it after my dog). Hachiko is also the name of a movie about a dog named “Hachiko”.
• The number 8 in Japanese.

Language Maturity

As of the time os this blog Hachi is at version 0.1.1, and is undergoing rapid development at the moment (mainly of the core library modules).

Currently Hachi’s development is solely driven by me and what my use cases dictate. I am rarely touching the internal C++ implementation code as much anymore, and moreso spending the majority of my time in Hachi creating modules for the core Hachi library to meet my own personal needs as they arise.

There is currently no package system, and after careful thought have determined that I will not work toward one (at this time).

I will post major update release notes in posts such as this on the site, so please stay tuned.

• Mike