Birchlabs

Bend2 launches tomorrow (maybe?) Let me talk a little bit For these who don't know me, I'm Victor. I've started programming when I was 11 years old, when I maintained a popular Open Tibia server in C++ and Lua. Since then, I enrolled Computer Engineering (never finished), helped build Ethereum, and have been studying programming language theory for the last decade. I've then built Kind (a minimal proof language), HVM (a parallel VM), and Bend1 (an early prototype of Bend2). So, what is Bend2? You can describe it as "the language design I honestly consider to be the best possible for a post-AGI economy". Bend2 doesn't have interaction nets, because I could not make them as fast as lower-order variants on everyday hardware, and Bend2 is designed to be practical, not idealistic. So, these expecting a Haskell-like lambda calculus engine will be disappointed. It is closer to C than it is to Haskell. But it still feels incredibly high-level, with JS-like closures and allocation (yet no GC!), Lean-like dependent types, and, of course, Bend1-like parallelism (with up to 100x faster raw speeds). So, Bend2 is something new that, on my honest PoV, has the potential to become the most sensible choice for any vibe-coded project. It is fast like C, parallel like CUDA, feels like Python. And, on top of that, it has something rare: a complete proof system, like Lean, which some of you may recognize as the language that labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have been using to solve open mathematical problems like Navier-Stokes. Bend brings that same proof system to a super fast app-centric language, allowing you to shift these powerful theorem proving models into ensuring that your apps are bug-free and hack-proof. The same capabilities that proved Navier-Stokes will now be writing real proofs that your own apps are correct. And I envision this as the obvious future of vibe-coded codebases. In a post-AGI economy, humans will eventually stop writing and reading code, but we still need a precise language to communicate our intents to the AI's maintaining our codebases. Bend is that language. Of course, Bend is not perfect yet. Writing a programming language is hard. Writing a proof language is 10x harder than that. Proving its consistency is 10x harder than that. Compiling it to the GPU, including closures, unrestricted recursion, fast object allocation and GC-free collection... is something nobody else has done before. So, needless to say: *expect bugs and limitations*. There is a huge ass section in our README talking about current limitations. For example, u64 and f64 are out. I did try adding them, but Metal doesn't even support f64. I gave up for now. On the brigher side, we have 32-bit numbers now, and Bend1's 2 GB memory limit has been lifted to 8 TB. Bend2 has a LOT of features that Bend1 lacked, and you'll find them in our guide. Bugs are expected mostly in the compiler, which, unlike the trusted proof kernel (which is very stable already), has a LOT of AI slop. There is no way on Earth there won't be many bugs. So, if your app crashes on day 1: please be patient, report and let us fix it <3 On the business: we ship without a product. Everything I could think of was either blocked by laws, or by the market not paying for compilers, and I'd rather increase our chances of success, than risk them just to make some immediate profit, or delay it foreer. Yes, years working in a project that isn't going to make a cent. I'm ok with it, because we have other, cooler things being cooked, and these are waaay easier to sell. So, yes, I'm giving this all to the world. Wanna show some appreciation? Just use it, create some apps, tell your friends about it, give it a fair chance and don't immediately give up if the compiler crashes or someone proves Empty on day 1 (yes, the theory is formalized, but the kernel drifted, so early days exploits are not impossible). If you find any bug, report it. If you miss any feature, request it. Our team of 4 humans (and 25 non-humans!) will be working hard to fix issues, address limitations, and make this language competitive with the mature alternatives in the market. I'm really proud of Bend2, I think it has the potential to become best language of choice for vibe-coded project, and I hope you find it as useful as I do. That's it for now. See you tomorrow(?) ^-^