Warm Signull documents the long-term design and implementation of a custom programming language, virtual machine, and supporting tooling, alongside the reasoning, failures, and constraints that shape them.
The work is guided by a preference for contact with reality: systems that admit what they depend on, expose their boundaries, and remain legible under pressure. Abstractions are treated as deliberate choices with explicit costs, rather than neutral conveniences.
The design goal is a single language and core representation capable of spanning microcontrollers, systems programming, desktop applications, games, web, and higher-level software, without requiring different languages for different domains. Platform differences are handled through explicit capabilities and opt-in features, rather than implicit assumptions.
The language is designed for both humans and machines. A minimal internal representation serves as the canonical form for tooling, analysis, and code generation, while users interact through one or more surface syntaxes chosen at the editor level. Syntactic sugar is permitted, but always reduces to a small, inspectable core.
This site records decisions, trade-offs, corrections, and failures as the work progresses, with the intent of making the reasoning as durable as the code itself. The emphasis is on design constraints and failure modes that are usually undocumented or discarded once implementations ship.
The design deliberately separates reasoning, development, and deployment concerns, allowing experimentation, persistent state, and tooling-heavy workflows without assuming that all components must ship or that a single execution model fits every stage.
This is not a short-term experiment. The work is pursued with a long horizon and a willingness to move slowly where understanding, correctness, and coherence matter more than speed.
Orientation
If you want to understand the thinking behind this work before diving into code or design notes, start with these pages:
Why Another Language
A discussion of the design space this project explores, and why existing languages do not address it as a whole.Contact With Reality
A statement of stance and orientation toward abstraction, constraints, and accountability.Abstraction, Indirection, and Accountability
On when abstraction earns its place and when it becomes insulation.Thinking Under Constraint
On dependency, failure, responsibility, and legibility under pressure.Fieldcraft vs Factory Thinking
Why many technical problems are treated as factory work despite being field problems.Seriousness, Play, and Human Cognition
Why excessive dryness becomes self sabotage, and why humor and warmth are functional.Divergent Work Is Legitimate
On non-linear work as a serious and equal way of thinking.
These pages explain why the project looks the way it does.
Current focus
- Defining a minimal internal representation that serves as the canonical form for analysis, tooling, and compilation
- Designing surface syntaxes that down-compile to the same core representation without semantic loss
- Establishing explicit effect, error, and capability boundaries that scale from constrained platforms to full systems
- Exploring opt-in runtime features, including different memory management and execution models, based on platform support
- Building VM and tooling infrastructure that keeps constraints and failure modes visible
- Writing and publishing design rationale alongside implementation, including rejected alternatives and trade-offs
How this site is organized
The site is structured around different states of work, rather than treating everything as equally finished.
Camp
Foundations, constraints, and load-bearing decisions.
Coming soon.
Trail
Chronological posts as the work unfolds.
Signal
Work I am prepared to stand behind publicly.
Coming soon.
Weather
Current working conditions and cadence.
Campfire
Personal notes, side thoughts, and non-serious writing.
Support
All work on Warm Signull is developed and published publicly.
Support increases the capacity available for sustained development, research, and documentation.