Building a low-level programming language in Python and LLVM (Looking for advice and collaborators!)

yash arya — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 13:38:12 +0000

Hello everyone,
I have a tremendous amount of respect for the developers in this community, and I wanted to humbly share a side project I have been working on called Ion+.
I am a 14-year-old student, and I have been building this as an experimental low-level programming language. The architecture uses Python for the frontend and an LLVM backend for code generation.
Right now, the project is still in its very early stages. I have completed the lexer, but I haven't completed the parser or the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) yet. Because I am balancing this with school and learning as I go, I simply do not have enough time or advanced expertise to build the whole thing by myself.
Because of this, I am reaching out to ask for your guidance and help. If anyone is interested in compilers, Python, or LLVM, I would be deeply grateful if you checked out the repository. Whether you want to leave architectural advice in the comments, open a pull request, or even fork the project to help build out the parser and other features, any support is welcome.
The project is completely open source under the Apache 2.0 license so anyone can experiment with it freely:
https://github.com/YashAryaPersonal/ion-plus
Thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to any advice or support you can share to help me learn and keep this project moving forward!

DEV Community: yash arya

Building a low-level programming language in Python and LLVM (Looking for advice and collaborators!)