Lateralus Programming Language

🌐 Official home: lateralus.dev — docs, playground, downloads, papers, and package registry.

Website • Docs • Playground • Download • Papers • Blog

Install

Platform / registry	Command
PyPI (canonical)	pip install lateralus-lang
npm (Node shim)	npm install -g lateralus-cli lateralus-lsp
Homebrew (macOS / Linuxbrew)	brew tap bad-antics/lateralus && brew install lateralus-lang
Docker / GHCR	docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/src" -w /src ghcr.io/bad-antics/lateralus-lang:latest
One-liner	curl -fsSL https://lateralus.dev/install.sh | sh
VS Code	marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=lateralus.lateralus-lang
Open VSX (VSCodium / Cursor)	open-vsx.org/extension/lateralus/lateralus-lang
Bootable ISO	GitHub release v3.2.0 → lateralus-os.iso

Distro packaging manifests (Arch AUR, Snap, Flatpak) live in packaging/.

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One language. Three lanes.

Lateralus is built for the jobs that usually need three languages:

1. Observability — structured logs, metrics, traces, in one binary.
2. Analytics — Parquet, Arrow IPC, SIMD-ready columnar ops shipped in the stdlib.
3. Secure-by-default — ChaCha20-Poly1305, X25519, BLAKE3, Argon2id — no OpenSSL, no surprises.

➡ Niche page · Stdlib vs Python/Go/Rust/Node · One-page cheatsheet · Open bounties →

Speed snapshot

Pure Lateralus → C99 backend vs CPython 3.13 (lower is better):

Benchmark	Lateralus (C)	CPython 3.13	Speedup
fib(35)	0.004 s	0.240 s	~60×
sieve(1e6)	0.020 s	0.600 s	~30×
mandelbrot	0.110 s	3.300 s	~30×
n-body 5k	0.080 s	3.200 s	~40×

See benchmarks/ to reproduce.

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Lateralus is a systems programming language built for performance, safety, and expressive pipelines. It combines Rust-inspired ownership semantics with first-class pipeline operators, pattern matching, and a rich standard library.

Features

• Ownership and borrowing with compile-time lifetime checks
• First-class pipeline operators for data transformation
• Algebraic types with exhaustive pattern matching
• Async/await with structured concurrency
• Traits and generics with monomorphization
• Zero-cost abstractions compiling to native code
• Built-in test runner with assertion support
• Multiple backends: native, C, WASM, JavaScript, Python

Quick Start

ltl run examples/hello.ltl

Write your first program:

fn main() {
    let names = ["Alice", "Bob", "Carol"]
    names
        |> filter(|n| n.len() > 3)
        |> map(|n| format!("Hello, {}!", n))
        |> for_each(|msg| print(msg))
}

Project Structure

• std/ — Standard library modules (collections, io, sync, crypto, etc.)
• stdlib/ — Extended standard library
• examples/ — Example programs and showcases
• bootstrap/ — Self-hosting compiler components
• lateralus_lang/ — Python reference implementation
• lateralus-os/ — Experimental operating system
• vscode-lateralus/ — VS Code extension with syntax highlighting
• docs/ — Language specification, tutorials, and papers
• tests/ — Test suite

Standard Library Highlights

Collections: HashMap, BTreeMap, Vec, LinkedList, BinaryHeap, Trie, SkipList, LRU Cache, BloomFilter

Concurrency: threads, async executors, channels, mutexes, rwlocks, barriers, semaphores

Networking: TCP/UDP sockets, HTTP client/server, WebSocket, DNS, firewall

Cryptography: AES, ChaCha20, SHA-256, SHA-3, BLAKE3, RSA, ECDSA, X25519, TLS, Noise Protocol

IO: buffered readers/writers, file system, path manipulation, file watching

Formatting: Display/Debug traits, padding, alignment, numeric bases

Time: Duration, Instant, Stopwatch, Deadline

Building from Source

git clone https://github.com/bad-antics/lateralus-lang.git
cd lateralus-lang
make build
make test

Documentation

• Language Spec: docs/language-spec.ltlml
• Tutorial: docs/tutorial.ltlml
• Cookbook: docs/cookbook.ltlml
• Grammar: docs/grammar.ebnf
• Blog: docs/blog/

Citation

If you use Lateralus in research, teaching, or production, please cite it. GitHub auto-renders a "Cite this repository" button from CITATION.cff, and every tagged release is archived to Zenodo with a permanent DOI via .zenodo.json.

@software{lateralus_lang_2026,
  author    = {{bad-antics}},
  title     = {Lateralus: A Pipeline-Native Programming Language},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {3.2.1},
  url       = {https://lateralus.dev},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  note      = {Per-release DOIs minted via Zenodo GitHub integration}
}

The latest-version Zenodo DOI always resolves to the most recent archived release; each tag also receives its own per-version DOI for reproducibility. Standalone papers under docs/website/papers/pdf/ can be deposited as independent Zenodo records via tools/zenodo_deposit.py.

License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.

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_{Made with care at lateralus.dev}