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Emil Valeev
Emil Valeev

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🎉 Happy New Year, Neva Community! 🎉

#go #programming #opensource #computerscience

Hi everyone! Emil Valeev here — the creator of the Neva programming language. As the year draws to a close, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to all of you who took part in this journey. Your feedback, contributions, and curiosity power this project forward — even when the road gets tough, or when Neva isn’t making headlines (or money!).

For a slightly bigger-picture take on why I believe Neva (and dataflow programming) matters, check out my recent article: How Programming Will Look In the Future?.

2025: A Big Year for Neva

Personal recap:

This year was a rollercoaster. I stepped outside open source and tried building a SaaS — learned a lot, but it didn’t pay the bills. That sent me back to job searching…but deep down, it was clear that I just couldn’t quit Neva. In March, the project officially went on “freeze,” but by September, I was hacking away again. The result? 2025 turned out to be huge for Neva.

What Actually Changed in 2025?

Core Language:

  • Introduced tagged unions (replacing enums!)
  • Rewrote overloading for clarity and flexibility
  • Prototyped Go interoperability: Go code can call Neva, and the compiler is starting to use this already (parts of the Go codebase even got rewritten in Neva)

These are foundational steps — unblocking Neva’s evolution as a language.

Toolchain:

  • IR visualization in threejs and mermaid formats
  • neva doc: Easily look up standard library docs (third-party support coming!)
  • neva run --watch: Live reloading for development
  • Richer trace.log diagnostics
  • --emit-ir flag for builds and runs
  • New cross-compilation support: loongarch arch, plus target-os/target-arch flags and a handy osarch command

Stdlib:

  • New errors package: errors.New, errors.Must, errors.Lift
  • Support for .env files (os.LoadEnv)
  • Powerful new stream combinators: streams.ZipMany, streams.Wait, strings.Join

Internal/Infra:

  • Refactored and optimized all over—deadlocks/races fixed, code restructured, new tests (unit, integration, e2e, and smoke tests!)

People:

  • 🎉 Welcome new contributors:
    • k1ngmang
    • mike
    • WoodyAtHome
    • 敖律风
    • Ikko Eltociear Ashimine
    • Zen
    • hardliner66
  • And thanks to everyone (big or small!) whose issues, code, or thoughts made Neva better.

Donations:

Set up Open Collective — and got the very first donation! It might seem small, but for me, it’s a symbolic “we exist” moment (equals my first SaaS dollar… Feels real!).

What’s Ahead for 2026?

Language Philosophy

After a lot of reflection, I realized: Neva’s biggest struggles often came from trying to blend a pure, parallel dataflow and visual-node philosophy with text syntax features inspired by control-flow languages. That tension led to confusion — and extra complexity.

For 2026, I’m doubling down on Neva’s strengths: minimalism, explicit components and nodes, ports, and message passing. This is what makes Neva different — and valuable! (I wrote a bit more on this in this GitHub issue.)

Technical Roadmap:

  • [ ] Visual Node Editor: The “WOW!” feature that will let everyone see the dataflow
  • [ ] Debugger Prototype: Even a concept or POC would be a breakthrough
  • [ ] Documentation Generator: Live/local docs to make onboarding & learning easier
  • [ ] Call Go from Neva: Finish cross-language interop, more compiler logic in Neva itself
  • [ ] Finalize language core: numeric types, bytes, pattern matching, dataflow primitives, type assertions. Aim: “the language core is stable and won’t break”!
  • [ ] Grow the stdlib: IO, stream abstractions, error handling for stream processors, JSON, HTTP servers, state & context APIs, iterators/generators, and more.
  • [ ] Absolute reliability: The compiler should never crash (all fatal bugs fixed by EOY). Compiler errors should always be actionable and clear.
  • [ ] Code Quality: Elevate maintainability across the board—compiler (especially type system, analyzer, desugarer) and runtime alike

Community & Growth

Neva’s big ambition is only possible if you join in! There’s no other language combining strong static typing, dataflow, and built-in parallelism in quite this way. In 2026, I want to focus more on:

  • Community (website, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, donation platforms, maybe investors)
  • Listening: Why did you get interested in Neva? What do you want to build?
  • Showcasing your stories and creations!

If you want more context about dataflow and why I see Neva as pioneering “the future of programming,” check out this dev.to post.

Thank you for a wild, emotional, progress-filled year. Here’s to bigger, bolder things for Neva in 2026, together!

—Emil

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