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Announcing Alpha Release

· 3 min read
Maurice Schmidt
Maurice Schmidt
Founder
Robin Füllgraf
Robin Füllgraf
Founder

In our last post (Who are we), we introduced ourselves —two long-time friends and developers on a mission to bridge the gap between the developer experience of TypeScript on the server and the performance of Go.

Today, we are excited to take the next step in that journey.

We are officially announcing the Duck Alpha​

What is Duck?

Duck is not just a new programming language; it is an ecosystem for modern fullstack development. We have built a comprehensive toolchain (dargo) designed to handle everything a modern full-stack developer needs. Meet the speed and concurrency of Go and a type system made for handling JSON Data combined in a unified workflow where the frontend and backend can live within a single source file or project.

Core Features at a Glance To give you a better idea of what Duck can do, we’ve broken down the current capabilities of the language and its toolchain:

A Sophisticated Type System​

  • Statically Checked Ducktyping: The flexibility of dynamic languages with the safety of a compiler.
  • Union & Sum Types: Familiar, TypeScript-like logic for handling complex data structures.
  • Generics: Fully supported, including generics for methods.
  • Explicit Mutability: Clear control over your data using const and let.
  • References: Compile-time enforced rules for mutable and immutable references.

Built for the Modern Web​

  • Unified Fullstack: Integrated support for React on the frontend and JSX-like templates for Server-Side Rendering (SSR).
  • Duckwind: Our own Rust-based implementation of Tailwind CSS, available for both frontend and backend.
  • Standard Library: A robust stdlib focused on web development, including a native String API and high-performance web server capabilities based on Go’s standard library.

Seamless Developer Experience​

  • Dargo & Duckup: A dedicated build system (Dargo) and toolchain manager (Duckup) to keep your environment slim and updated.
  • JSON Power-User Features: Built-in JSON Schema parsing, transformations, and type-safe parsing with a single function call.
  • Go Interoperability: Include Go imports and inline Go blocks directly to leverage the entire Go ecosystem.
  • Pipe Syntax: Includes a Pipe Operator (->) for cleaner, more readable logic.
  • Built-in Testing: A native test runner integrated into the compiler to ensure stability from day one.---

The Road Ahead​

We are just getting started. Our vision is for Duck to be the "everything you need" language for web developers, allowing you to build entire applications without ever leaving your .duck files. To get there, our immediate roadmap includes:

  • LSP (Language Server Protocol): For better IDE support.
  • Official VS Code Plugin: Bringing syntax highlighting and autocompletion to your favorite editor. For now we only support treesitter
  • Standard Library Expansion: Adding pre-built React components, HTML templates, and modules for Auth, Crypto, and CLI tools.

Join the Journey​

Duck is entirely open source. We are currently releasing Nightly Builds through our toolchain manager, duckup. We invite you to explore the code, try breaking it and share your thoughts and the bugs you found.

We are currently working intensively on our landing page, which will take you to all the resources you need on the subject of Duck. However, our focus remains unchanged: we want to bring our language to the stage and work on getting towards the first beta release.

See you next time