If you’ve spent any time writing low-level code in C, you already know the trade-off: raw power and control, paired with undefined behavior, cryptic syntax quirks, and bugs that only show up at 2 a.m. in production. Over the last few years, a handful of “modern C alternatives” have emerged to fix this — Rust, Zig, and, less famously but just as interestingly, the Hare programming language.
Hare doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. It doesn’t chase the feature checklist of Rust or the metaprogramming tricks of Zig. Instead, the Hare programming language was built around a much simpler promise: give systems programmers a small, stable, predictable tool that will still make sense in a hundred years. That’s not marketing fluff — it’s a stated design goal of the project.
In this guide, we’ll break down what the hare programming language actually is, where it came from, what makes it different from C, Go, Rust, and Zig, and how you can get started writing your first Hare program today.
What Is the Hare Programming Language?
The Hare programming language is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. It’s statically typed and compiled, uses manual memory management, and ships with a deliberately minimal runtime. That combination makes it well-suited for the kind of work C has traditionally handled: operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, performance-critical tasks.
Unlike many newer languages that try to layer on convenience features — generics, garbage collection, elaborate macro systems — Hare takes the opposite approach. It strips things back. The goal isn’t to be the most powerful or flexible language on the market; it’s to be a language you can fully understand, top to bottom, without needing a 900-page specification to keep in your head.
This “less is more” philosophy is baked into everything about the Hare programming language, from its syntax to its standard library to the way its maintainers evaluate new feature proposals.
History and Origins of Hare
Hare was created by Drew DeVault, a developer known for founding projects like SourceHut and the Sway window manager. He first released Hare in 2022 as a direct response to frustrations with existing systems languages — particularly C and C++.
The core problem DeVault set out to solve wasn’t unfamiliar to any systems programmer: C is powerful, but it’s also easy to misuse. Undefined behavior, unsafe memory patterns, and decades of accumulated syntax quirks make it hard to write and maintain reliable code, especially as codebases grow. C++, meanwhile, solved some of these problems by adding more — more abstractions, more paradigms, more complexity — which introduced a different set of headaches.
The hare programming language was designed to sit in between: safer and more consistent than C, but without the sprawling complexity of C++ or even Rust. Today, Hare is maintained by a small, dedicated open-source community — around a dozen core maintainers and roughly a hundred contributors — who continue to develop the language, its standard library, and its reference toolchain. It’s worth noting that Hare is still evolving; the language and its standard library remain subject to breaking changes as the project matures toward long-term stability.
| Note: Curious how Hare stacks up on raw performance? Check out our breakdown of the fastest programming languages to see where it lands. |
Key Features of the Hare Programming Language
This is where the Hare programming language really sets itself apart. Let’s go through its defining characteristics one by one.
1. Static, Inferred Type System
Hare uses a static type system, meaning types are checked at compile time rather than at runtime. This catches a large class of bugs before your code ever runs. Hare’s type system also supports inference in many contexts, which cuts down on verbose type annotations without sacrificing the safety benefits of static typing.
2. Manual Memory Management
Unlike Go or Java, Hare has no garbage collector. Memory is managed manually, similar to C. This gives you precise control over performance and resource usage — critical for operating systems, embedded devices, and other environments where predictable memory behavior matters more than developer convenience.
3. Minimal Runtime
Hare programs run with a minimal runtime footprint. There’s no heavyweight virtual machine or extensive runtime library sitting between your code and the hardware. This makes Hare a natural fit for resource-constrained environments and low-level systems work.
4. Built-In defer for Resource Cleanup
Hare includes a defer statement, similar to what you’ll find in Go or Zig, which lets you schedule cleanup code (like closing a file or freeing memory) to run automatically when a function exits. This significantly reduces the risk of resource leaks — a common source of bugs in manually managed languages like C.
5. Full UTF-8 Support
Text handling is a notorious pain point in C. Hare builds in full UTF-8 support from the ground up, making string handling considerably less error-prone for anyone working with modern, internationalized text.
6. Automatic Sub-Typing for Struct Pointers
One of Hare’s more elegant features is automatic sub-typing for pointers to structs. Essentially, a pointer to one struct type can automatically cast to a pointer of another type, as long as the second type appears at the start of the first. This lets developers implement abstract interfaces cleanly — for example, building a custom I/O stream that behaves like the standard library’s built-in stream types, without needing a full-blown interface or trait system.
7. Comprehensive Standard Library
Despite its minimalist philosophy, the hare programming language ships with a surprisingly capable standard library. It includes support for regular expressions, string operations, and date/time arithmetic — features that go beyond what C’s standard library offers out of the box, and that many “modern C” competitors leave out entirely.
8. Fast Toolchain and Build Times
Hare’s compiler and toolchain are built for speed. Compile times are fast, and the overall developer feedback loop is tight — a deliberate design choice that keeps the language practical for real-world, iterative development.
9. Comprehensive Error Handling
Hare treats error handling as a first-class concern. It uses a more generalized and flexible approach to tagged unions and errors than many comparable languages, allowing developers to attach meaningful context to errors as they propagate through a program — without resorting to exceptions or panics.
Hare vs. Other Programming Languages
If you’re evaluating whether to learn the Hare programming language, it helps to see how it stacks up against the alternatives you’ve probably already considered.
Hare vs. C
Hare is often described as “what C could have been” if it were designed today. It improves on C with better error handling, a stronger and more comprehensive type system, bounds-checked slices (which prevent a huge class of memory-safety bugs), and cleaner, more intuitive syntax. It also removes some of C’s more error-prone quirks, like fallthrough behavior in switch statements.
Hare vs. Go
Both languages value simplicity, but they diverge sharply in execution. Hare has no garbage collector, no generics, and a more comprehensive type system and error-handling model than Go. It also lacks Go’s built-in concurrency features and userspace scheduler — which, depending on your use case, is either a meaningful limitation or exactly the kind of low-level control you’re looking for. Developers frustrated by how difficult true low-level systems work can be in Go often find the Hare programming language a better fit for that specific niche.
Hare vs. Rust
Rust and Hare share some DNA — both emerged partly as reactions to C’s shortcomings — but Hare is dramatically simpler. It lacks generics, traits, and macros, and it offers fewer memory-safety guarantees than Rust’s borrow checker provides. Culturally, the two projects differ too: Hare deliberately has no package manager and encourages less code reuse as a stated value, whereas Rust leans heavily on its Cargo ecosystem. In exchange for fewer guarantees, Hare offers a much faster toolchain, quicker build times, and — according to many who’ve used both — a more comprehensible, maintainable path to solving the same class of problems.
Hare vs. Zig
Of all the “modern C” contenders, Zig is probably Hare’s closest sibling, and Hare is simpler than Zig in both design and implementation. The two languages share some ideas, like defer and built-in testing, but Hare skips Zig’s comptime metaprogramming, generics, and other advanced compile-time features entirely. Hare’s error-handling and tagged-union model is also more flexible than Zig’s, letting developers add richer context to errors. On the standard library side, Hare leans further into C-style expectations — regex, robust string handling, date/time arithmetic — while Zig’s standard library tends toward more novel, higher-level features like HTTP and TLS support.
Getting Started with the Hare Programming Language
Ready to try it yourself? Here’s what the process looks like.
1. Install Hare. The official installation guide walks through setup for supported platforms. Before you start, it’s worth checking the supported platforms list, since Hare — like many young systems languages — doesn’t yet support every architecture and operating system combination.
2. Write your first program. Hare’s “Hello, World!” is refreshingly simple:
| use fmt; export fn main() void = { const greetings = [ “Hello, world!”, “¡Hola Mundo!”, “Γειά σου Κόσμε!”, “Привіт, світе!”, “こんにちは世界！”, ]; for (let greeting .. greetings) { fmt::println(greeting)!; }; }; |
Even in this small example, you can see a few of Hare’s defining traits: clean, readable syntax, native UTF-8 string support, and explicit error handling (that trailing ! after fmt::println is Hare’s way of propagating errors without hidden exceptions).
3. Work through the official tutorial. Once you’ve got Hare installed, the official documentation includes a full introductory tutorial that covers the language’s syntax, type system, and standard library in more depth.
4. Explore the project library. If you want to see the Hare programming language in action beyond toy examples, the community maintains a library of real Hare projects — a good way to learn idiomatic patterns and find inspiration for your own work.
Hare Syntax Basics: What to Expect as a Beginner
If you’re coming from C, Go, or Rust, Hare’s syntax will feel familiar within the first hour of reading it — but there are a few conventions worth calling out before you dive in.
Variable declarations. Hare distinguishes between const (immutable bindings) and let (mutable bindings), similar to Rust and modern JavaScript:
| const name = “Cybersolvings”; let count = 0; |
Functions. Function declarations use the fn keyword, with the return type specified after the parameter list:
| fn add(a: int, b: int) int = { return a + b; }; |
Error handling. Rather than exceptions, Hare uses tagged unions to represent values that might fail. The ! operator, seen in the “Hello, World!” example earlier, propagates an error up to the caller instead of silently swallowing it. This forces developers to think explicitly about failure paths — a habit that tends to produce more resilient systems software.
Modules. Hare organizes code into modules using the use keyword, similar to imports in other languages:
| use fmt; use os; |
Structs and sub-typing. As mentioned earlier, Hare structs support automatic sub-typing when one struct type is embedded at the start of another. This lets you build interface-like abstractions without needing full traits or classes — a pattern borrowed loosely from Go’s struct embedding, but with more explicit control.
None of this syntax is particularly exotic if you’ve written C, Go, or Zig before. That’s intentional. The hare programming language was designed so that experienced systems programmers could become productive within days, not weeks.
Real-World Use Cases for Hare
Where does the Hare programming language actually get used today? A few common categories stand out:
- Operating system components. Hare’s manual memory management and minimal runtime make it a natural choice for kernel-adjacent tools, bootloaders, and low-level OS utilities.
- Command-line tools and system utilities. Fast compile times and a small binary footprint make Hare well-suited to CLI tools that need to run quickly and predictably across many machines.
- Networking software. Hare’s standard library includes solid support for common networking primitives, making it a reasonable choice for lightweight servers, proxies, and network utilities.
- Compilers and language tooling. Because Hare itself was built with careful attention to parsing and type-checking performance, it’s a popular choice among developers building their own compilers, interpreters, or domain-specific languages.
- Embedded and resource-constrained systems. The minimal runtime and lack of garbage collection make Hare attractive for environments where memory and CPU cycles are tightly budgeted.
It’s worth being honest here: Hare is still a young language, and you won’t find it powering major commercial products the way C, Rust, or Go do. Its current use cases lean heavily toward hobbyist projects, open-source tooling, and systems programmers who want to experiment with a more disciplined alternative to C. That said, for a language released in 2022, the pace of standard library growth and toolchain maturity has been steady.
The Hare Community and Ecosystem
One thing that sets the Hare programming language apart from many newer languages is its deliberately small, focused community. Rather than chasing rapid adoption, Hare’s maintainers — a group of roughly a dozen core contributors alongside about a hundred community contributors — have prioritized long-term stability over short-term hype.
This shows up in a few concrete ways:
- No official package manager. Unlike Rust’s Cargo or Go’s module system, Hare deliberately avoids a centralized package manager. The philosophy here is to encourage smaller, more self-contained codebases rather than a culture of heavy dependency chains — a direct response to the “dependency bloat” problems seen in some larger language ecosystems.
- A curated project library. Instead of a sprawling package registry, Hare maintains a curated list of known projects and libraries built with the language, making it easier to find quality, actively maintained code.
- RFC-driven development. Major changes to the language go through a formal proposal process, and the community actively debates additions like linear types before they’re accepted — a sign of the project’s cautious, long-term thinking.
- A stated 100-year goal. Hare’s community frequently references the idea of building a “100-year language” — one stable and simple enough to remain useful and readable across generations of developers, the same way C has endured since the 1970s.
If you value fast-moving ecosystems with huge package registries, this minimalism might feel limiting. But if you’re drawn to the idea of a language that changes slowly and deliberately, the Hare programming language’s community culture will likely appeal to you.
Who Should Use the Hare Programming Language?
Hare isn’t trying to replace every language for every job — and it won’t be the right fit for every developer. Here’s a realistic breakdown.
Hare is a strong fit if you:
- Build operating systems, system tools, or embedded software
- Write compilers or networking software
- Want C-like control without C’s undefined-behavior landmines
- Value a small, learnable language over a feature-rich one
- Care about fast build times and a tight developer feedback loop
Hare may not be the right choice if you:
- Need generics or advanced metaprogramming
- Rely on garbage collection for memory management
- Need a mature package ecosystem with a package manager
- Are working on a large team that needs Rust-level compile-time safety guarantees
Pros and Cons of Hare
| Pros | Cons |
| Simple, learnable syntax | No generics |
| Fast compile times and toolchain | No package manager |
| Comprehensive error handling | Smaller ecosystem than Rust or Go |
| Full UTF-8 support out of the box | Fewer memory-safety guarantees than Rust |
| Minimal runtime, ideal for low-level work | Language still subject to breaking changes |
| Active, focused open-source community | Fewer supported platforms currently |
Final Thoughts
The Hare programming language won’t be the loudest name in systems programming, and that seems to be exactly the point. While languages like Rust and Zig compete on feature sets and cutting-edge safety guarantees, Hare is quietly building something different: a small, stable, deeply understandable language meant to still make sense decades from now.
If you’re a developer who’s tired of C’s rough edges but doesn’t want to take on the learning curve of Rust’s ownership model or Zig’s compile-time metaprogramming, the Hare programming language is worth a serious look. It won’t do everything — but what it does, it does with clarity and intention.
Want to go deeper into modern systems programming languages? Keep an eye on the Cybersolvings blog for more comparisons, tutorials, and beginner guides.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Hare Programming Language
1. Is Hare production-ready?
Hare is still under active development, and both the language and its standard library remain subject to breaking changes. It’s best suited today for hobby projects, tooling, and developers comfortable working with an evolving toolchain, rather than mission-critical production systems.
2. Does Hare have garbage collection?
No. Like C, Hare uses manual memory management. This gives developers full control over performance and resource usage, but it also means the responsibility for avoiding memory leaks and use-after-free bugs falls on the programmer, not the runtime.
3. Is Hare harder to learn than Go or Rust?
Generally, no — if anything, it tends to be easier than Rust, since it skips Rust’s borrow checker and ownership model entirely. Compared to Go, Hare requires more manual memory discipline, but its syntax and standard library are comparably approachable.
4. What platforms does Hare support?
Hare supports a growing but still limited set of platforms compared to mature languages like C or Rust. Before starting a project, it’s worth checking the official supported platforms documentation to confirm compatibility with your target system.
5. Who maintains the Hare programming language?
Hare was created by Drew DeVault and is maintained by a small, active open-source community of core maintainers and contributors who continue to develop the language, standard library, and toolchain.
