Prism exists because building native software today means assembling a stack of incompatible tools. We think one language, one toolchain and one ecosystem is a simpler answer.
For twenty years, writing native software has meant choosing between speed and safety, between a great type system and a great editor, between the platform you ship on and the platform your users run. Each choice bought a separate language, a separate toolchain and a separate ecosystem that only partly works with the others.
Prism is an attempt to stop making those trades. It is a compiled, memory-safe language with a native UI toolkit, a package manager, a language server and a formatter — all maintained together, all versioned together, all tested against each other.
Every feature in Prism has to justify itself against these. If a change weakens one of them, the change is the problem, not the principle.
A language is only as good as the tools around it. Prism ships the compiler, package manager, formatter and language server as one integrated system.
Platforms are targets, not forks. The same source compiles to desktop, mobile, web and headless environments without conditional codebases.
Interfaces render through the platform’s real widget toolkit. There is no webview, no JS bridge and no embedded browser between you and the user.
Ownership, borrow checking and safe-by-default references prevent the classic C and C++ failure modes at compile time.
A single registry, a single lockfile, a single version of the truth. Package management is part of the language, not a separate tool.
Signals, structured concurrency, good errors, fast builds. Ergonomics are a performance requirement, not a marketing claim.
The project has never had a private phase. Every milestone shipped in public.
Prism begins as a small experiment in a single repository: can one language produce a native UI and a server binary from the same source?
The first self-hosted compiler compiles Prism to native binaries for three platforms. The standard library starts with collections, networking and concurrency primitives.
The package manager, formatter, test runner and language server ship together as the `prism` command. The project is released as v0.1.0 and opened to the public.
The UI markup language lands: declarative views that compile to native widgets. iOS and Android targets enter the pipeline.
Stability. A frozen core language, a documented standard library and a release process designed to be maintained for decades.
Honest milestones, in order. Nothing here is a promise of a date — just of a direction.
Prism is free and open source. Use it in commercial products, fork it, ship it — the license asks only that the copyright notice stays intact.