Hylo is a programming for high-level systems programming based on the premise that (mutable) value semantics can be leveraged for safety and efficiency. While the language is still under development, its overall design has solidified into a coherent system offering promising results. Reaching that stage has been a surprisingly long road. First ideas were scribbled on a notepad four and a half years ago and since then countless Zoom meetings, GitHub threads, and coffee break discussions have happened. This talk will take us for on a brief tour of this journey. We’ll start from what inspired us to build Hylo, reflect on early design choices, and discuss some of the challenges we faced maintaining the project alive and its surrounding community engaged.

I’m a post-doc researcher at EPFL (Switzerland). I’m working on language designs for safe and high-performance computing.

Besides research, I’m also actively involved in software development and engineering, and actively maintain a handful of open source software libraries. Most (if not all) of my work is available on my GitHub profile.