13-year Rust veteran created new programming language single-handedly

Is it possible to create a full-fledged programming language without a team, investment and corporate support? This question has haunted Steve Klabnik, one of the most famous representatives of the Rust community, for many years. And only towards the end of 2025 he decided to test this idea in practice.

The result was unexpected even for the developer himself. Using the AI ​​tool Claude, Klabnik wrote about 100 thousand lines of code in Rust in just 11 days and created an experimental systems programming language called Rue .

From skepticism to an experiment with AI

It’s paradoxical, but The co-author of the book “The Rust Programming Language” has been extremely wary of artificial intelligence for a long time, writes xrust. Creating his own language remained his long-time dream, but constant busyness and the high complexity of such projects prevented him from starting to implement it.

Since first learning about Rust in December 2012, Klabnik has spent over 13 years designing languages, developing communities, and improving the developer user experience. He developed an interest in compilers back at university — then he deliberately chose specialized courses, trying to understand the structure of programming languages ​​from the inside.

In one of the posts on his personal blog, he wrote that he tried to write code in different languages, and the process of creating his own language seemed especially exciting to him. However, early in his career he chose a more practical direction — web development, which was largely facilitated by the rapid growth of Ruby on Rails.

Why Rust, but not the compiler

Later, Klabnik decided to contribute to the development of Rust, but deliberately refused to work on the compiler. According to him, he realized that he could bring more value in other areas — documentation, popularization and community building. Over time, these areas became his main area of ​​responsibility.

Observing the evolution of the industry, the developer came to the conclusion that modern programming languages ​​are almost always the result of teamwork. If previously single projects could develop into popular solutions, today the requirements have grown significantly: package managers, static analysis tools, LSP, integration with editors have become a de facto standard.

Time as the main deficit

Clubnik does not hide the fact that with age, free time has become noticeably less. In 2025, his life has changed and his priorities have shifted. He admits that now it’s difficult for him to even find time for a hobby, not to mention participating in open-source projects.

However, it was the development of AI that marked a turning point. Gradually, Klabnik began to notice that tools based on large language models were turning from “curious toys” into real assistants. At some point, he had a question: is AI capable of writing a compiler?

How Claude helped create Rue

Experiments with Claude progressed: at first the AI performed small tasks, then took on more and more complex development elements. The turning point was when the model was able not only to generate compiler code, but also to independently find and correct the error after the unsuccessful launch of the first program.

The project was briefly put on hold due to a long business trip, but by the end of 2025, Klabnik returned to development with a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of AI. This allowed us to significantly speed up the process and improve the language architecture.

He eventually decided to open source Rue and publicly announce the project. The repository is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/rue-language/rue

In his blog, the developer noted that in just a week he managed to create a “germ language” with a basic implementation and two different code generation backends — a result that he called truly incredible.

From personal project to community

class=»notranslate»>__GTAG10__Initially, Rue was conceived as a personal experiment, but after publication the project attracted the attention of other developers. Over time, new members joined and the language ceased to be a completely solo initiative.

Why the language was named Rue

The choice of name was not accidental. According to Klabnik, the name should have started with «Ru» — as a reference to his love for Ruby and Rust. In addition, the word rue has a slight negative connotation in English, which echoes the philosophy of Rust. There are also natural associations: rue is a plant, and rust is traditionally associated with mushrooms. The brevity of the name was also an important factor.

Technical philosophy of Rue

Rue is positioned as a systems programming language, but it does not aim to replace Rust. The main goal of the project is to provide memory safety without using garbage collection and at the same time lower the barrier to entry compared to Rust and Zig.

Garbage collection simplifies memory management, but is not always suitable for systems programming. Rust has become popular precisely because of its alternative approach, but this comes at the cost of difficulty in mastering it. Klabnik believes there is room for new experiments.

In his opinion, abandoning the race for maximum performance in favor of ease of use can open up new directions for development. He also emphasizes that the topic of memory safety without tracer garbage collection is still not fully understood, and Rue is his personal attempt to offer a new perspective on this problem.

Xrust A 13-year Rust veteran created a new programming language single-handedly