About
Maxon is created and directed by Eric Stern.
The split of labor is the same one the language is built around. The design is human: the philosophy that code should be optimized for the reader, the syntax, the type system, the decision to push constraints into types and to have no null — those are deliberate choices. The implementation is the AI’s: the compiler, the standard library, the language server, and the documentation are written by AI coding agents working under that direction.
Maxon exists to test an idea — that if AI is going to write most of the code, a language should be designed for that, optimizing for the reader rather than the typist — and to find out what that actually feels like by building a complete, working toolchain on the premise.
How it came together
Maxon began in November 2025. Through the period below, Eric was its sole developer, directing the AI agents that wrote the code. Getting to a self-hosted language meant building a series of bootstrap compilers first — in C++, then Zig, then C# — each one able to compile Maxon while the language itself was still taking shape.
- November 2025 — first light. The project starts: lexer, parser, a working compiler, and a language server. An early experiment with an LLVM backend is dropped in favor of writing a custom native x86-64 code generator from scratch. This is the C++ bootstrap compiler — the first thing that could turn Maxon source into a native executable.
- Late November 2025 — going native. The C++ compiler’s custom backend lands, emitting real PE and ELF executables with no external dependencies. A SIMD lexer and parser and the first optimization passes follow within days.
- December 2025 — the standard library, and a Zig bootstrap. The standard library fills
out and the language server is embedded into the compiler. A second bootstrap compiler,
written in Zig (
maxon-bin), is started mid-month and becomes the main build before the year is out. - December 2025 — the self-hosted compiler begins. In parallel, work starts on writing the Maxon compiler in Maxon. It builds for the first time within a week.
- January 2026 — the C# bootstrap. A third bootstrap is written in C#
(
maxon-sharp). Built from the same language spec but along an independent path, it becomes the reference the self-hosted compiler is continuously tested for parity against — two compilers agreeing on a program’s behavior is the bar. It’s the compiler Maxon ships with today, while the self-hosted one matures. - March 2026 — retiring Zig. With the C# reference and the self-hosted compiler both advancing, the Zig bootstrap has done its job and is removed.
- Through 2026 — toward self-hosting. The self-hosted compiler advances feature by feature — real strings and interpolation, enums and unions, generics, ranges and iterators — steadily closing the gap with the C# reference.
- Next — full self-hosting. Maxon compiling Maxon, end to end. Not quite there yet — but close.
Open source
The project is open source under MIT and Apache-2.0, and contributions are welcome. You can find the source and reach the author on GitHub.