Welcome! I'm building Ribbon: an open-source programming language and real-time software engine, designed for a future community passionate about a new era of extensible systems. My goal is to craft this together, with anyone who cares deeply about this kind of platform. Together, we can help the beautiful communities and software ecosystems they foster become even better.
For too long, a tension has existed between platform Hosts (needing performance, security, control) and extension Guests (craving flexibility, ease of use, rapid iteration).
I have spent the better part of the past decade on the research, design, and engineering of the core principles and features of Ribbon in order to resolve this, by combining:
- Performance & Control: Zero GC, composable allocation strategies, and fine-grained system access for demanding applications.
- High-level DX & Domain Awareness: Strong static typing with full inference, plus a Lisp/Terra-Lua inspired toolkit for deep customization and DSL creation.
- Safety & Extensibility: Strong guarantees about guest code behavior; preventing unauthorized memory access and ensuring extensions operate predictably, making it exceptionally robust for embedding.
The upcoming 0.1.0 release marks a significant milestone, aiming to empower game developers, modders, bespoke language developers, and all creators of extensible platforms. Reaching future goals for Ribbon relies on building a strong open-source community. Financial sponsorship is vital here, enabling dedicated development time, community infrastructure, and the growth of Ribbon as a sustainable, user-driven project.
Join me in building this! Every contribution; whether code, issue reporting, documentation, ideas, or funding, helps build a future where software is more performant, robustly extensible, and a joy for everyone to create with.
Financial sponsorship at any level will directly support:
- Establishing a non-profit foundation to steward Ribbon's future, a key step in making it truly community-owned.
- Essential community infrastructure like servers, domain hosting, and CI/CD, ensuring continuous and stable growth.
- Dedicated development time, starting with full-time focus for myself as the lead developer, to accelerate core features and stability, with the aim to bring on more contributors as funding allows.
- Creation of comprehensive learning resources and documentation, making sure new friends find a lovely path into our community.
- Growing 💝
Let's make Ribbon a cornerstone for the next generation of extensible software!
Meet the team
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nox noxabellusfunctional & systems programmer, type theory meddler, language designer, game dev. spending most of my time over at @tiny-bow
Featured work
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tiny-bow/ribbon-language
Ribbon programming language
Zig 15 -
tiny-bow/ribbon-engine
Ribbon realtime software engine
Zig