Lateralus Programming Language

🌐 Official home: lateralus.dev — docs, playground, downloads, papers, and package registry.

Website • Docs • Playground • Download • Papers • Blog

Install

# From PyPI (recommended)
pip install lateralus-lang

# One-liner from lateralus.dev
curl -fsSL https://lateralus.dev/install.sh | sh

VS Code users: install the Lateralus Language extension for full IDE support.

One language. Three lanes.

Lateralus is built for the jobs that usually need three languages:

1. Observability — structured logs, metrics, traces, in one binary.
2. Analytics — Parquet, Arrow IPC, SIMD-ready columnar ops shipped in the stdlib.
3. Secure-by-default — ChaCha20-Poly1305, X25519, BLAKE3, Argon2id — no OpenSSL, no surprises.

➡ Niche page · Stdlib vs Python/Go/Rust/Node · One-page cheatsheet · Open bounties →

Speed snapshot

Pure Lateralus → C99 backend vs CPython 3.13 (lower is better):

See benchmarks/ to reproduce.

Lateralus is a systems programming language built for performance, safety, and expressive pipelines. It combines Rust-inspired ownership semantics with first-class pipeline operators, pattern matching, and a rich standard library.

Features

• Ownership and borrowing with compile-time lifetime checks
• First-class pipeline operators for data transformation
• Algebraic types with exhaustive pattern matching
• Async/await with structured concurrency
• Traits and generics with monomorphization
• Zero-cost abstractions compiling to native code
• Built-in test runner with assertion support
• Multiple backends: native, C, WASM, JavaScript, Python

Quick Start

ltl run examples/hello.ltl

Write your first program:

fn main() {
    let names = ["Alice", "Bob", "Carol"]
    names
        |> filter(|n| n.len() > 3)
        |> map(|n| format!("Hello, {}!", n))
        |> for_each(|msg| print(msg))
}

Project Structure

• std/ — Standard library modules (collections, io, sync, crypto, etc.)
• stdlib/ — Extended standard library
• examples/ — Example programs and showcases
• bootstrap/ — Self-hosting compiler components
• lateralus_lang/ — Python reference implementation
• lateralus-os/ — Experimental operating system
• vscode-lateralus/ — VS Code extension with syntax highlighting
• docs/ — Language specification, tutorials, and papers
• tests/ — Test suite

Standard Library Highlights

Collections: HashMap, BTreeMap, Vec, LinkedList, BinaryHeap, Trie, SkipList, LRU Cache, BloomFilter

Concurrency: threads, async executors, channels, mutexes, rwlocks, barriers, semaphores

Networking: TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP client/server, WebSocket, DNS, firewall

Cryptography: AES, ChaCha20, SHA-256, SHA-3, BLAKE3, RSA, ECDSA, X25519, TLS, Noise Protocol

IO: buffered readers/writers, file system, path manipulation, file watching

Formatting: Display/Debug traits, padding, alignment, numeric bases

Time: Duration, Instant, Stopwatch, Deadline

Building from Source

git clone https://github.com/bad-antics/lateralus-lang.git
cd lateralus-lang
make build
make test

Documentation

• Language Spec: docs/language-spec.ltlml
• Tutorial: docs/tutorial.ltlml
• Cookbook: docs/cookbook.ltlml
• Grammar: docs/grammar.ebnf
• Blog: docs/blog/

License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.

_{Made with care at lateralus.dev}