Most modern languages are built on top of C. They rely on libc for everything from printing a string to opening a socket.
I wanted to see if I could go deeper.
I built Jadn: a systems language with zero dependencies. It doesn't use libc. It doesn't use LLVM. It doesn't even use a linker.
Pure Syscalls
When Jadn wants to talk to the world, it talks directly to the Linux kernel. Here is how it handles a write:
1 fn print(buf: &i8, len: i64) {
2 syscall(1, 1, buf, len) // Direct syscall: write(stdout, buf, len)
3 }
The "Hardcore" Stats:
- Bootstrapped from Assembly: The first compiler was written in raw x86-64 asm.
- Self-Hosting: The compiler now compiles itself (fixed-point reached!).
- Insane Compile Times: 42ms average. That’s 33x faster than Rust.
- Tiny Static Binaries: A full grep clone or HTTP server is just 1MB and runs on any Linux machine with zero setup.
Why do this?
Because abstractions have become too heavy. By stripping away libc, I found that you can actually beat C at JSON parsing (31ms vs 32ms) and LZ77 compression (6.6x faster).
It turns out, when there's nothing between your code and the kernel, things get very fast, very quickly.
What’s the "lowest" you’ve ever gone in your stack? Assembly? Raw syscalls? Let’s talk in the comments!
👉 Try it: jdalang.org/docs/getting-started
👉 GitHub: github.com/jdalang/jda-lang
👉 Discussions: github.com/jdalang/jda-lang/discussions
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