A new language for resilient services.
Hew is a high-performance, network-native, machine-code compiled language for building long-lived services. Actor isolation, supervision trees, and wire contracts — compiled to native code through LLVM.
- hew.sh — Language website and documentation
- hew.run — Online playground
- HEW-SPEC.md — Language specification (v0.3.0)
brew install hew-lang/hew/hew- VS Code — Hew Language extension (syntax highlighting + LSP)
- Vim / Neovim — vim-hew syntax plugin
- Tree-sitter — tree-sitter-hew grammar for Neovim, Helix, Zed, and other tree-sitter editors
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| hew | Compiler, LSP server, and language toolchain |
| tree-sitter-hew | Tree-sitter grammar (authority syntax definition) |
| vscode-hew | VS Code extension with syntax highlighting and LSP |
| vim-hew | Vim/Neovim syntax highlighting |
| hew.sh | Language website and documentation |
| hew.run | Online playground |
| homebrew-hew | Homebrew tap for macOS/Linux installation |
| Examples | Example programs and patterns |
Hew is built around four pillars:
- Actor Isolation — Every actor owns its state. No shared memory, no data races. Compile-time capability checking ensures safety without runtime cost.
- Supervision Trees — Services crash — Hew expects it. Supervisors restart failed children with configurable strategies.
- Structured Concurrency — Tasks are scoped to their parent. Cleanup is automatic and deterministic.
- Wire Contracts — Network protocols are first-class types with schema evolution rules enforced at compile time.
Apache 2.0