Zeta: The Final Systems Language

Zeta is a systems programming language inspired by Elements of Programming (EOP) algebraic foundations, by Alexander Stepanov, the Godfather of the C++ Standard Template Library. Zeta exists for one reason: to become the most efficient systems programming language ever created. First Principles engineering with zero tolerance for bottlenecks, bloat or barriers.

“It’s not just efficiency, it's weaponized minimalism. It’s surgical violence against complexity.” - Roy Murphy

• Insane efficiency
• Unbeatable execution speed & performance
• Built for next-gen AI infrastructure
• Designed for machine learning & numerical analysis
• Perfect for scientific computation
• Awesome for embedded hardware
• Military grade security
• Runs faster than Rust & Zig
• Compiles faster than Go
• Practicality of Python
• Beats Julia for scientific computation
• Quicker statistics than R
• Magnitudes faster algebra than MATLAB
• Produces smaller binaries than C
• Parse strings like Perl
• Baked-in SIMD optimization
• Native WASM support
• Self-hosting in ~3,100 lines of code
• Very low cyclomatic complexity

Zeta v0.3.2 is released. There are zero competitors. We're living in a brand new paradigm.

“Complexity assertions have to be part of the interface.” - Alexander Stepanov, 1995

Official Benchmarks — January 25, 2026

Intel i9-13900K · Ubuntu 24.04

$ time zeta compile src/main.z -o zeta3
0.014s  ← compiles itself in fourteen milliseconds.

Prerequisites (Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04 LTS or Debian 12)

To build Zeta from source, you need:

1. Rust nightly (2024 edition requires it until stable catches up

rustup toolchain install nightly
rustup default nightly
rustup component add rustfmt clippy

3. LLVM 21 (exactly — Inkwell 0.8.0 + llvm-sys-211 targets LLVM 21.1)

wget https://apt.llvm.org/llvm.sh
chmod +x llvm.sh
sudo ./llvm.sh 21
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y llvm-21 llvm-21-dev llvm-21-tools libpolly-21-dev clang-21 libclang-21-dev

5. Development libraries (required by linker for zlib, zstd, etc.)

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential zlib1g-dev libzstd-dev libxml2-dev libstdc++-13-dev

7. Set LLVM environment variable (add to ~/.bashrc or run before build)

export LLVM_SYS_211_PREFIX=/usr/lib/llvm-21
source ~/.bashrc

8. Verify

llvm-config-21 --version   # should print 21.x
cargo --version            # should show nightly toolchain

Features

• Algebraic semiring CTFE + fusion
• CacheSafe → strict TBAA → maximum LLVM vectorization
• Thin monomorphization + global specialization cache
• Owned UTF-8 string literals are now built-in.
• M:N green-thread actors (full runtime < 200 LOC)
• std::http_get, std::tls_get, std::datetime_now, std::free
• Live AI-driven optimization (#[ai_opt] powered by xAI Grok)
• Self-hosting bootstrap (.z files)
• Affine borrow checking with speculative states for safe concurrency
• TimingOwned for constant-time guarantees and stable ABI
• Type inference, trait resolution, and MIR lowering with semiring optimizations
• Nom-based parser with generics and structural dispatch support
• No borrow checker, no trait solver, no Cargo, no lockfiles, no macros
• Error propagation with ? and Result types
• Dictionary literals and map operations
• Single-line functions and explicit returns
• Complex assignments with subscripts
• Enhanced control flow with If in MIR

Quick Start

# Install (one binary - coming soon)
# curl -L https://z-lang.org/install | sh

# Build from source (after prerequisites above)
git clone https://github.com/murphsicles/zeta
cd zeta
cargo build --release

# Run a simple program
cargo run -- examples/add.z          # JIT execution

# Compile to binary
cargo run -- compile src/main.z -o hello
./hello

Build from source

# Full clean build (recommended first time)
cargo clean
cargo build --release

# Run tests
cargo test --workspace

# Run benchmarks (no plot yet)
cargo bench

Rust 2024 edition · Dependencies: nom, inkwell (LLVM 21), rayon, reqwest, serde, criterion

Status

Zeta v0.3.0 achieved self-hosting bootstrap on January 20, 2026. See plan.rs for the victory log.

License

MIT © 2025 Dr. Roy Murphy

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