Meet Hare: The New C‑Alternative System Language Redefining Low‑Level Development

On Monday, software developer Drew DeVault announced Hare, a new system programming language described as simple, stable, and robust.

Hare aims to be a C replacement, leveraging a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime, making it suitable for operating systems, system tools, compilers, network software, and other low‑level high‑performance tasks.

The language draws heavily from C’s design, adding conservative improvements while incorporating ideas from Go’s standard library, such as a batteries‑included approach that reduces external dependencies.

Hare’s standard library provides cryptographic suites, networking, date/time handling, I/O and filesystem abstractions, Unix utilities (poll, fnmatch, glob), POSIX regex, a parser and type checker, and extensive documentation.

It does not link against the C standard library; instead it uses the QBE compiler backend. A “Hello World” program in Hare looks like:

use fmt;
export fn main() void = {
    fmt::println("Hello world!")!;
};

An example printing an array of greetings in multiple languages:

use fmt;
export fn main() void = {
    const greetings = [
        "Hello, world!",
        "¡Hola Mundo!",
        "Γειά σου Κόσμε!",
        "Привет, мир!",
        "こんにちは世界！",
    ];
    for (let i = 0z; i < len(greetings); i += 1) {
        fmt::println(greetings[i])!;
    };
};

Hare is often compared to a streamlined version of Zig, another low‑level language with manual memory management, and positioned as a conservative language that distills 30 years of experience into a small, simple, yet powerful tool for the next three decades.

Currently, Hare supports x86_64, aarch64, and Riscv64 architectures on Linux and FreeBSD, with plans for additional platforms. While macOS and Windows are not officially targeted, third‑party ports or forks are possible.

The project follows a BDFL governance model, focusing on stability and incremental enhancements such as TLS and raw IP socket support. DeVault is using Hare for a password manager and kernel work, anticipating broader use cases once TLS is available.

Development is driven by about 30 contributors over two and a half years, with fundraising aimed at covering cryptographic audit costs.