MoonBit compiler is available on GitHub

We are happy to announce that the MoonBit compiler with Wasm backend is now open source and available on GitHub! Developed initially as a private project over the past two years, this approach allowed us to move quickly and focus on building a strong foundation. Now, we’re ready to gradually open our doors and invite the community to help shape its future. The source code is released under a licensed variant of the Server-side Public License, and our goal is to embrace greater openness as the community grows.

You can find the code on GitHub.

Why should we open source the Wasm backend? WebAssembly has huge potential to be safe, fast, and cross-platform, but existing languages ​​have yet to fully realize it. MoonBit’s primary goal is to be a language optimized for Wasm. in our First blog postwe introduced MoonBit as a fast, compact, and user-friendly WebAssembly language. Last year, MoonBit launched JS and national In terms of backend, WebAssembly has always been our priority and the most complete backend. MoonBit is supported Wasm component model and reduces the code size in the http-hello-world example to 27kB, compared to other languagesmaking MoonBit-wasm ready for production use.

We currently use a modified SSPL (Server Side Public License) Two key exceptions:

1. Artifacts produced by the MoonBit compiler can be licensed by users under any license of their choice. MoonBit users are free to choose licenses for their own MoonBit source code and generated artifacts.

2. Modifications to the compiler for non-commercial purposes are permitted.

While we value openness, we chose this adjusted SSPL over a fully permissive license for two main reasons:

1. MoonBit is still in beta preview. Introducing a fork at this point may destabilize the project. Our goal is to reach a more mature and stable state before welcoming community contributions.

2. We want to prevent large cloud vendors from using our work for commercial purposes and thereby undermining our efforts.

Over the past two years, our team has worked hard to improve MoonBit and its toolchain, adhering to our vision of creating a fast, simple, and efficient language. By open-sourcing MoonBit, we want to assure our users that our team remains committed to MoonBit’s pace of growth and innovation. We also want to assure our users that MoonBit will not adopt open core model, all MoonBit users will receive state-of-the-art compiler and IDE support. The MoonBit team will try to generate long-term revenue through hosting services and hardware SDKs.

access MoonBit Public Source Code License.

Building a programming language is a long journey. It took Rust 9 years and Go 5 years to reach 1.0. MoonBit, built by a young and motivated team, is making steady progress. We know community adoption and expansion are key for new languages, and we’re fully committed to cultivating an engaged and collaborative community around MoonBit. So far we have open sourced core library and most tools, including Build tools, Lex, price reductionwith more coming soon. Having compiler sources available is important for security measures. Open sourcing the Wasm backend is another important step and is on our roadmap to open sourcing more in the future.

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