Introducing Mulan: China’s New ‘C for the IoT Era’ Programming Language

Release Overview

On 15 Jan 2024, the National Key Laboratory of Computer Architecture, Chinese Academy of Sciences released “Mulan” (木兰), a domestically developed programming language aimed at intelligent Internet‑of‑Things (IoT) applications. The language, its compiler and IDE are designed and implemented entirely in‑house.

Name Origin

“Mulan” is an abbreviation of “Module Unit Language”. The acronym “MuLan” incorporates the Greek letter μ (mu) to convey “tiny”, reflecting the language’s lightweight design. The Chinese name “木兰” was later adopted.

Design Goals and Technical Features

Mulan targets the “smart IoT era” and seeks to become a C‑like language for embedded, network‑connected devices. Key technical characteristics include:

Fully self‑developed compiler and integrated development environment.

Elastic actor execution model that enables fine‑grained parallelism and can improve application throughput while reducing platform operating costs.

Cross‑platform runtime with explicit support for domestic processors such as Loongson.

Motivation

Existing IoT development typically mixes several general‑purpose languages, requiring multiple engineers and complex integration. Mulan provides a single language and execution platform to streamline development of intelligent IoT services.

Implementation Details

The first public release, version ulang‑0.2.2, was implemented in Python and packaged with a PyInstaller‑style extraction to the user’s temporary directory ( %temp%). This approach mirrors common Python single‑executable distribution mechanisms.

Ecosystem and Adoption

Since 2018 the language has been introduced in a K‑12 education program (“Youth Silicon Valley”) covering roughly 700 schools in 18 provinces. The associated teaching equipment has a cumulative value of about 30 million CNY.

Future Outlook

Developers are encouraged to experiment with Mulan on heterogeneous hardware, especially on Loongson CPUs, to build a more autonomous IoT software stack. The language’s ecosystem is expected to mature over several years.