Every engineer has a project in their code graveyard that taught them more through its failures than its successes. For me, that project was the beginning of Achronyme.
What started as a simple experiment to create Digital Signal Processing (DSP) pipelines escalated wildly. I fell into the classic “Scope Creep” trap: I wanted a general-purpose language, with a custom graphics engine, UI, and async support… all at once.
The Half-Megabyte Mistake
The result of that unbridled ambition was an architectural Frankenstein’s monster.
In my initial versions, I committed the cardinal sin of memory management: naivety. I modeled data as heavy objects, abusing Arc<T> and JavaScript-style structures for everything. There was no cache locality, no arenas, just smart pointers scattered across the heap.
The cost of that abstraction was brutal: a simple “Hello World” consumed 500KB of RAM. The runtime was slow, heavy, and frankly, unusable for anything serious. I had to pause it.
The Pivot: Rust and Memory Discipline
During that hiatus, I discovered the real potential of Rust when applied correctly. Not just for safety, but for the control it gives you over memory layout if you’re willing to fight the borrow checker.
I decided that Achronyme wasn’t going to die as a slow toy. It was going to be reborn with a new and specific purpose: Cryptography and Protocols.
For a language to be useful in the world of cryptography (and potentially Zero-Knowledge Proofs), it needs precision and efficiency, not heavy abstractions. This meant redesigning the VM from scratch with principles opposite to the previous version:
- Goodbye
Arc, Hello Arenas: Instead of expensive atomic reference counting for every object, I now manage memory via Typed Arenas (Slabs). This guarantees memory locality and makes garbage collection much more predictable. - NaN Boxing: To squeeze every bit, I implemented NaN Boxing. Now, a 64-bit value can be a float, a pointer, or a small integer, all without heap allocations.
- Native BigInts: Cryptography doesn’t live on floats. The new engine is designed to integrate
BigIntsand finite field elements as first-class citizens.
Current State (“In Diapers”)
This new phase of Achronyme is just beginning. I’m building the foundations: a real Garbage Collector (Mark-and-Sweep), support for efficient data structures, and an architecture that doesn’t choke on recursion.
The long-term goal is ambitious: to turn Achronyme into a mature language for cryptographic applications, capable of compiling to WebAssembly or optimized native binaries (perhaps via LLVM).
It’s not the easy path, but after seeing what a poorly made “Hello World” costs, efficiency is no longer an option; it’s the only goal.